Plankton Planet

Acrobat’s crew adds to the list of Planktonauts collaborating with the Plankton Planet experiment.

Plankton, which includes all the organisms that drift with oceanic currents (from viruses to marine animals), is the basis of the food chain and produces about 50% of the oxygen we presently breath. It is strongly impacted by the environmental changes as it responds to them very rapidly, be them due to pollution or climate change. At present, the uncomplete knowledge of biodiversity and plankton evolution is one of the major obstacles to the development of a functional model of our biosphere, which would allow to predict global environmental changes.

The Plankton Planet project proposes an innovating citizen’s oceanography based upon navigation. It aims at sensing biodiversity and our oceans’ health at spacially and temporally relevant scales.

Led by CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research), funded by the French government, and inspired by the French project Tara-Oceans (2009-2013, check the results published in the 22 May 2015 special issue of Science), Plankton Planet tries to create a connection between citizens prone to continuously collect samples and the best international experts in oceanography whose role is to analyze them to count the number of species therein. These data represent vital information to measure the total plankton biodiversity at a given place and time, in order to construct a model of the plankton ecosystems able to predict their evolution in the oceans of the future.