NOAA NMFS just announced that funding has been secured to operate the Gulf of Maine Continuous Plankton Recorder from 2021-2024. This CPR line, which ran almost continuously from 1961 to 2017, provides vital phytoplankton and zooplankton size, abundance and community data. Long-term, consistent, environmental and ecological time series such as this one are rare. These time series provide a vital glimpse on how ecosystems are changing in response to climate change and increase anthropogenic impacts because they are able to provide a type of "baseline" on what ecosystems looked like decades ago, before human alterations on the environment were so severe.
This NOAA news article links to our Lenfest research project because we provided the funding to process shelved CPR samples from 2012-2017. These data have been made publicly available and can give scientists and managers a better view of the dramatic changes that have occurred in the Gulf of Maine since 2010. Thanks to our processed samples, and the reinstatement of the CPR next year, I hope that this dataset will continue to inform ecosystem science in the Northwest Atlantic! |
AuthorErin Meyer-Gutbrod is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her lab researches human impacts to marine ecosysems. Archives
April 2024
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