This award supports the major US-facing sampling effort of the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) Survey in the North Atlantic, the longest running and most extensive marine plankton survey in the world. The survey captures the microscopic floating plankton in the open ocean using silk mesh in sampling devices towed along standard routes, and the many species of plankton are identified and counted by the CPR analyst team-over 800 types are identified.   The ‘plant-like’ phytoplankton are responsible for the majority of all photosynthesis on earth, using sunlight to draw carbon dioxide out of the air and water.   They provide food for tiny animals-zooplankton, which themselves support the vast food web of all the larger organisms in the ocean, from fish to whales.   Additionally, carbon fixed by plankton may fall to the ocean floor as ‘marine snow’, so changes in the plankton community affect both the ocean’s productivity and carbon budget.   Plankton and the ocean food web they support are vital to humans and also being affected by human activities, ocean warming and acidification.   Because the sampling devices are mechanical and towed behind commercial shipping, the carbon emissions associated with CPR survey activities are minimised.

Since 1931 the survey has covered over 7.2 million nautical miles (a Guinness World Record) and adds a further 10 thousand miles of tow each month: the long time-series of consistent measurements along each route enables us to identify changes and trends in the ocean due to man-made factors and climate change.  NSF has maintained support for the CPR survey in the NW Atlantic (in particular the ‘Z-route’ tows from Iceland to the US through major fisheries) continuously since 1990, and the survey database includes pre-1980s tow results for long-term comparisons.   The CPR survey database currently includes over 250 000 samples and is freely available to researchers in the US and around the world. The data have formed the basis of hundreds of publications on climate change and the ecosystems of the North Atlantic. In addition to consistent coverage of the North Atlantic basin, survey work extends into the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and also covers part of the North Pacific, to the west of the Alaskan coast.

The CPR survey is the world’s only truly basin-scale marine biological survey and NSF funding ensures its continuity. Objectives of the project have been: maintenance of core observing system, maintenance of quality and expertise, innovative marine ecological research, data provision and model validation, new technologies and added value, international contributions and integrated observing systems and knowledge and policy transfer.

CPR Survey researchers and associated researchers published 19 papers in 2022 using CPR data, and contributed to ICES Scientific Reports. These publications included a variety of collaborations with US researchers; in 2022 the survey collaborated with researchers at Woods Hole, the Bigelow lab for Ocean Sciences, NOAA Fisheries, U. of Maine, Ocean Visions, UGA, U. of Kansas, the Smithsonian, UCSD, UVA and others.

Research themes in 2022 included studying the connections between plankton and much larger marine animals in the North Atlantic such as Sand eels and Sunfish.   The range occupied by these fish was found to change over time, tracking changes in ocean temperatures and plankton productivity.

The size of the CPR dataset and the variety of organisms recorded also allowed researchers to investigate basic ecological questions about how and why diverse communities of organisms form, and how each kind of organism finds and occupies a ‘niche’ in the community that enables it to survive and preserves biodiversity as a whole.   The variety of different traits exhibited by competing plankton organisms was found to enable each species to find an opportunity to thrive as conditions vary over time and space.

The ‘ecosystem services’ provided by the plankton community (the important functions of the plankton to humans and other organisms) can be assessed and tracked through time using CPR data.   In particular CPR data was used to quantify changes in the activity of plankton which sequester carbon in the North Atlantic and Arctic and move it to deeper water.

The open CPR data (those taxa consistently recorded since 1958), are made freely available under a CC-BY license via DASSH, the UK Node of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), hosted at the MBA. In 2022 the CPR dataset was downloaded over 700 times from DASSH.  Using global data exchange standards the CPR data are harvested by a number of larger marine biodiversity aggregators including EMODnet Biology, EurOBIS and the global OBIS database.  CPR data is downloaded thousands of times a year from OBIS (more than 3700 times so far this year).   In addition CPR data provide a key component of data products developed by ICES, OSPAR, and the European Open Science Cloud Blue-Cloud Pilot to support policy, management and decision making.

Last Modified: 03/11/2024
Modified by: Peter H Wiebe