News Desk on July 20, 2013
Washington, July 20 (ANI): A team of international researchers have compiled the first ever global atlas cataloguing marine plankton ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish, to identify where, when, and how much oceanic plankton can be found around the globe.
The atlas, known as the Marine Ecosystem Biomass Data (MAREDAT), is the first step towards a comprehensive inventory of the marine biota based on counts of individual cells or organisms.
It will help researchers better understand marine biodiversity for conservation and monitoring and is the result of collaborations between scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the University of East Anglia, ETH Zurich, University of Manchester, Universite d’Angers and CNRS, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), together with many other scientific institutions around the world. Read more