Sergey Piontkovski, Associate Reseach Professor
Principal Investigators: Sergey Piontkovski in collaboration with researchers at oceanographic institutes in Ukraine, Russia, UK, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.
Project Description
Core international projects dealing with the ocean have emphasized an urgent need for information on the impact of climate change on species diversity and on the development of efforts to deal with this impact. In order to assess this impact, a global database of historical plankton community composition is needed. The objective of the project is to develop a plankton database of over 22,000 stations sampled during the Former Soviet Union (FSU) oceanographic expeditions. This database will contain 22 expeditions to the Atlantic Ocean and over 30 expeditions to the enclosed seas of the Atlantic Ocean, including over 30 years of sampling in the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea, and the Indian Ocean. At present, there is a lack of knowledge on the interannual climate-related variability of zooplankton communities of these regions due to the absence of appropriate databases.
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is the dominant mode of atmospheric fluctuations over eastern North America, the northern Atlantic Ocean and Europe. Therefore, one of the issues that need to be addressed through data synthesis is the evaluation of interannual patterns in species abundance and species diversity over these regions in regard to the NAO.
From the database created, the project team will investigate the ecological role of the NAO in interannual variations of the abundance of key zooplankton species along the zonal array of the NAO influence (from the western side of the Atlantic Ocean to its eastern side, and through the enclosed seas of the Mediterranean basin to the Arabian Sea). The data compiled will be added to the World Ocean Database.
For more information:http://soundscience2.msrc.sunysb.edu:8080/plankton/index.jsp.
Funded by NSF Division of Environmental Biology.
Camping with Ukrainian and Russian colleagues and students along the northern coast of the Black Sea (Sevastopol, Crimea)
An example of plankton sampling sites. Background picture is a climatic field of chlorophyll a concentration constructed from the full CZCS data (http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/)
