Oceanographers Part of International Team Studying Plankton, Maine Edge Reports
The Maine Edge published a University of Maine news release announcing UMaine researchers are part of a collaborative international team studying plankton. During expeditions aboard the research vessel Tara, researchers collected 35,000 samples from the world’s oceans. Data generated from the samples are providing unprecedented resources — including a catalog of several million new genes — expected to transform how oceans are studied and establish a global-scale baseline to evaluate the impact of climate changes on oceanic ecosystems. In five articles in a special issue of Science, the team maps the biodiversity of a range of planktonic organisms, exploring their interactions and how they impact and are affected by their environment, primarily temperature. UMaine oceanographers Emmanuel Boss and Lee Karp-Boss are part of the science team and participated in six expedition legs. UMaine doctoral student Alison Chase; Ivona Cetinić, research associate at the Darling Marine Center; and Tom Leeuw, who earned a master’s degree in oceanography at UMaine in 2014, also contributed to the research.