Collaborative Research: Diel, Seasonal, and Interannual Patterns in Zooplankton and Micronekton Species Composition in the Subtropical Atlantic

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Planktonic communities comprise an incredibly wide diversity of organisms that form the basis of marine food webs. We propose a multi?species inventory of zooplankton and micronekton at the Bermuda Atlantic Time?series Study (BATS) station, an 11 ?year, ongoing oceanographic time series situated in the western North Atlantic subtropical gyre or Sargasso Sea. The program will provide high?resolution species data that covers diel, seasonal, interannual, and decadal time scales. Detailed accompanying environmental data already available from BATS cruises (e.g., water column temperature, oxygen, nutrients, and plant pigment concentration) add additional value to the data set. Both species and environmental "metadata" will be formatted using techniques already well developed and in use at BATS for compilation and provision of data of interest into OBIS. Our proposed project will involve participation from both academia (Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Russian Academy of Sciences' Zoological Institute) and government (the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History). We have developed a partnership with significant collective experience in the study of the subtropical North Atlantic system and expertise in the identification (and ecology of) all major taxa of zooplankton and micronekton. This project will provide a high quality time series of zooplankton and micronekton species composition enabling us to dissect the difference between natural variability and real 'change' in the diversity of plankton communities. This will be critical for testing and validation of ecosystem models, and for understanding the effects of long term climate change on ecosystems.