Monterey Bay Historical Zooplankton 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. Zooplankton (small animals that drift with the ocean currents) are at the base of the marine food web just above phytoplankton (plants!), and it is critical that we understand their historical ecology in Monterey Bay. In this project, we seek to liberate nine years of zooplankton sample data from our shelves. [We also have a similar project for phytoplankton 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).