Monterey Bay Historical Phytoplankton Project

Climate change is driving rapid changes in our biosphere on local and global scales. Our capacity to understand these shifts relies entirely upon two critical things: long-term biological and environmental observations, and an ability to discover and access them. Phytoplankton (microscopic oceanic plants that drift with the currents) form the base of the marine food web, and it is critical that we understand their historical ecology in Monterey Bay. In this project, we seek to liberate fifteen years of phytoplankton sample data from our shelves. [We also have a similar project for zooplankton data!] These data were collected at weekly intervals in Monterey Bay, CA and are part of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program, which ran from 1951 - 1974 in Monterey (and is ongoing in other parts of CA).