A global "atlas" showing the distribution of tiny ocean creatures could help climate scientists better understand the effects of global warming.
The atlas, a database with more than half a million data points, is the most comprehensive survey of marine plankton to date.
Plankton are tiny marine creatures, some as small as a billionth of a metre (one nanometre), that capture CO2 and form the basis of the ocean food chain. Understanding where different species of plankton are distributed and when they appear is vital to creating good models of the impact of climate change and acidification on the oceans.
Called Marine Ecosystem Data (Maredat), the database is the result of three years of collaboration between the University of East Anglia (UEA) and ZTH Zurich, and other institutions. The team behind the database combined data from sources going back to the 1920s, even collected data from hand-written notes.
The Maredat research is published in a series of papers in the journal Earth System Science Data on 19 July.
"[Maredat] will allow climate researchers to compare their models with real data on a scale that's never been available before," Roisin Moriarty of UEA's school of Environmental Studies told Wired.co.uk.
Plankton can be broadly divided into two types: photosynthesising phytoplankton and non-photosynthesising zooplankton.
Phytoplankton are the plants of the sea. At just a few picometres in length, they are unimaginably tiny, but they able to photosynthesis and therefore play a crucial role in capturing CO2 and locking it at the bottom of the ocean when die and sink into its depths.
For this reason, they are an important part of the global warming mechanism.
Zooplankton are a category of much larger creatures, which include krill and jellyfish. They form the basis for much of the ocean food chain and so good data about the zooplankton ecosystem is important for understanding how fish stocks develop.
The new data provides more detail about the different types of plankton and takes into account more plankton types. This will allow climate scientists to make more detailed models of how the oceans respond to climate change and how they operate as carbon sinks.
Early insights from the database include the surprising discovery that the zooplankton have an equal or greater biomass than their plant-like counterparts phyto-plankton. On land, the opposite is true, with plants far outweighing animals.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
