In order to determine whether the physical characteristics of the California Current System (CCS) impact planktonic communities, the Planktoscope Team will analyze and visualize the distribution of plankton species that have been identified using Ecotaxa (covered in our last post). A research article titled The Seasonal and Inter-Annual Fluctuations of Plankton Abundance and Community Structure in a North Atlantic Marine Protected Area by Benedetti et al. (2019) is being used as a guide on how to best analyze the identified plankton collected on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) West Coast Ocean Acidification (WCOA) cruise.
This article by Benedetti et al. (2019) uses plankton abundance and community structure to document the efficacy of marine protected areas in the North Atlantic. Hydrobiological and planktonic data was collected on various oceanographic cruises, using stations along two nearshore-offshore transects. The hydrobiological data was collected using both a sampling probe and a Niskin bottle, with sampling and laboratory measurements following standard procedures. Plankton was identified utilizing EcoTaxa, the same technology used to identify the plankton from NOAA’s WCOA cruise.
The analysis of the plankton community by Benedetti et al. (2019) is serving as a guide for the Planktoscope’s analysis of the WCOA cruise planktonic communities. Benedetti et al. (2019) used Correspondence Analysis (CA) to quantify the relationship between phytoplankton counts and sampling stations. Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) was used to describe the relationships between the hydrobiological data and the main phytoplankton species and genera.
The Planktoscope team is analyzing the data from the WCOA cruise to define the relationship between CCS plankton communities and CCS physical characteristics, while using the strategies of Benedetti et al. (2019) as a reference of best practices when utilizing planktonic and environmental data. These analyses will be combined with visualizations of physical oceanographic parameters and plankton community structure as our team answers questions about the CCS and how organisms may react to changes caused by ocean acidification in the future.
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