New global plankton data product to link climate and fisheries in global models

This microscopic image of Protoperidinium quinquecorne is enhanced with a fluorescent dye, and shows chlorophyll pigment in red.. Credit: NOAA Ocean Service

Despite their small size, marine plankton form the base of the food chain and are essential to marine ecosystem functioning. Plankton communities are diverse in size, and the relative abundance of different sized organisms provides information to scientists about how the total amount of living things in an ecosystem and how efficiently nutrients are able to travel up the food chain. Climate researchers predict that warming oceans will cause shifts in plankton communities across the global ocean, and consequently, these organisms represent an important link between climate and fisheries. Plankton community size, structure, and behaviors are difficult to measure, but a project supported by a partnership between CPO’s Climate Observations and Monitoring (COM) Program, Climate Variability and Predictability (CVP) Program, and NOAA’s Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing (GOMO) Program is working on a robust global plankton database, called the Pelagic Size Structure database (PSSdb).