Leveraging commercial ships for ongoing phytoplankton community observations

Project Summary:

This project focuses on understanding and sampling phytoplankton communities in the Northwest Atlantic. The team will integrate high-throughput automated microscopic imaging with existing physical and chemical observations collected along the route of the CMV Oleander between New Jersey and Bermuda. By adding an Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB), the project will generate hourly, taxonomically resolved measurements of thousands of individual plankton across seasons and water mass boundaries. These openly accessible data products will provide  spatial, temporal, and taxonomic resolution of plankton communities and serve as baseline information to support future OVSN projects.

View the full abstract here.