Mechanistic understanding of the role of diatoms in the success of the Arctic Calanus complex and implications for a warmer Arctic (DIAPOD)
The DIAPOD project is a £2 million, four year (2017-2021) research programme funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) as part of the Changing Arctic Ocean (CAO) programme. The aim of the DIAPOD project is to develop a predictive understanding of how the biomass dominant marine zooplankton taxon Calanus will be affected by future climate change in the Arctic.
Calanus account for up to 90% of zooplankton biomass in the Arctic Ocean and are central to Arctic food webs making calanus key indicators of ecosystem function. They also transport vast quantities of carbon into the deep ocean via the Calanus lipid pump. As the Arctic Ocean is responding to global climate change in ways that are not yet fully understood and in some cases, not yet identified, the project will address the following questions:
- How does change in the Arctic Ocean alter the availability of this key Arctic food source?
- How does this influence the cycling of carbon in the Arctic?
Further information can be found on the Changing Arctic Ocean DIAPOD webpage.
Participants
There are seven organisations involved in the DIAPOD project, these are:
- University of Stirling
- University of Strathclyde
- Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS)
- Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS)
- Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML)
- National Oceanography Centre (NOC)
- British Antarctic Survey (BAS)
In addition to these core organisations, there are 16 international collaborators involved in the project.
Research Details
The DIAPOD project uses past datasets of Calanus in the Arctic and satellite derived data on primary production to investigate whether smaller, more temperate species have been increasingly colonising of the Arctic and how the timing of lifecycle events have changed over past decades and between different Arctic regions. Field based experiments examine how climate driven changes in the quantity and omega-3 content of phytoplankton will affect features of the Calanus lifecycle including reproduction and lipid storage for diapause. The new understanding gained will be used to produce numerical models of Calanus' life cycle for future forecasting. These projections will also be compared to historical data.
Fieldwork and Data Collection
The CAO programme consists of seven core cruises that survey areas in the Barents Sea and the Fram Strait on board the NERC research vessel RRS James Clark Ross with DIAPOD represented on a number of these cruises. The sampling areas for the DIAPOD project include Disko Bay, AWI transect, Loch Etive, Fram Strait, Barents sea and Iceland Survey area. The data collected consist of CTD profiles; microplankton samples from water samples; chlorophyll a, POC/PON, fatty acids and pigments from water samples; net deployments; genetics for Calanus samples; respiration rates for Calanus species; copepod lipids and biomarker composition; lipid studies in zooplankton from samples and molecular identification of zooplankton. In addition to the collected data, satellite data imagery will be interpreted and the project incorporates the following existing datasets:
- Zooplankton samples collected from the Atlantic Arctic
- Continuous plankton recorded data from 1960 onwards
- Continuous plankton recorded data from Norwegian routes from 2008 onwards
