BEST: Assessment of mesozooplankton population and biomass in the eastern Bering Sea for spring and summer of 2008, 2009 and 2010

BEST(白令海生态系统研究)是一项由美国国家科学基金会资助的大型研究工作，其目标是确定和量化气候和生态系统响应之间的机制联系。生态系统通过改变其组成种群的丰度、生物量和物种组成来响应气候强迫的变化。如果没有形成食物网基础的低营养水平种群的信息，就不可能确定系统的状态，估计变化的方向或大小，以验证或驳斥假设，或充分验证低营养水平模型或将其参数化。为了帮助评估构成东白令海大陆架生态系统的物种组成、丰度和生物量在最佳状态下的状况和变异性，并估计种群趋势，提供了资金，以便在每年两次巡航期间收集和处理来自东白令海的大约260个浮游动物样本，并对所得数据进行分析。

The goal of BEST (Bering Sea Ecosystem Study), a large NSF-supported research effort, is to identify and quantify mechanistic links between climate and the ecosystem response. An ecosystem responds to changes in climate forcing by altering the abundance, biomass and species composition of its constituent populations. Without information on lower trophic level populations forming the base of the food web, it is impossible to determine the state of the system, estimate the direction or magnitude of change, if any, to validate or refute hypotheses or to adequately validate or parameterize lower trophic level models. In order to contribute to the assessment of the state and variability of the species composition, abundance and biomass of the populations forming the ecosystem of the Eastern Bering Sea Shelf during BEST and to estimate population trends, funds are provided to collect and process approximately 260 zooplankton samples from the eastern Bering Sea during each of two cruises per year and to analyze the resultant data.