Bio-GO-SHIP Honored with an Excellence in Partnering Award

An international, collaborative project that features Bigelow Laboratory Senior Research Scientist Nicole Poulton has been awarded the 2024 Excellence in Partnering Award from the National Oceanographic Partnership Program.

The Excellence in Partnering Award is given annually to a NOPP project that best exemplifies the program’s mission of developing a successful network of partnerships to advance ocean sciences. The Piloting Biological Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (Bio-GO-SHIP) on US cruises: Towards a global analysis of large-scale changes to ocean plankton systems is led by Adam Martiny, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and supported by NOAA, NSF, and NASA. It is part of the international GO-SHIP effort, which carries out regular sampling of select regions of the global ocean.

In addition to Poulton and Martiny, the interdisciplinary team includes Harriet Alexander of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Jason Graff of Oregon State University, Luke Thompson of the Northern Gulf Institute and the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, and Sophie Clayton from the National Oceanography Centre, UK.

Over the past 30 years — with sustained, decadal observations of ocean physics and chemistry — GO-SHIP has provided critical constraints on changes in ocean heat content, ventilation, penetration of anthropogenic carbon, and oxygen loss, all of which have serious implications for marine life. However, direct measurements of ocean biodiversity, which are fundamental to understanding marine ecosystems, have been historically left out from sampling.

Bio-GO-SHIP is filling this gap to better understand the role of plankton in global biogeochemistry and to quantify biodiversity across the ocean.

“Adding biological measurements to the GO-SHIP program is highly valuable, as sustained biological measurements are chronically under sampled across ocean basins,” Poulton said. “Observing how biological communities are fluctuating will help us understand broader environmental changes in the ocean, which may have significant effects on marine ecosystems and resources.”

The pilot project deployed advanced technology to gather key biological data along GO-SHIP transects in three ocean basins and across 400 stations.

One of those technologies is flow cytometry, a method adapted from the biomedical sciences of quickly counting and characterizing microscopic particles as they flow, single file in a fluid stream, in front of a laser. As director of the Center for Aquatic Cytometry, Poulton has contributed flow and imaging cytometry tools to the program that are enabling researchers to continuously sample surface water and get information on biological parameters like the abundance and composition of phytoplankton communities.

“Flow cytometry is transforming the way we study plankton and other aquatic microorganisms,” said Research Associate Laura Lubelczyk, who just returned from a multi-week research cruise in the Indian Ocean across one of the GO-SHIP transects. “With instruments like the Cytek Northern Lights and the Imaging Flow Cytobot, we're now able to collect detailed, real-time data that can help us better understand marine life and the environmental challenges our oceans face.”

With all of this biological information, the researchers are beginning to unravel the relationship between surface community structure and carbon sequestration, the connections between surface processes and biodiversity in the deep ocean, and the links between shifting plankton communities and broader ocean changes, among other questions.

Project highlights so far include the training of 13 students in cutting-edge scientific techniques, the development of novel approaches for using ocean plankton as “biosensors” of environmental change, the establishment of ocean basin-wide patterns in plankton diversity and function, and the production of data management and sampling best practices.

The team has also worked to integrate in situ measurements of optics and ocean color with satellite data to help validate remote sensing tools. In fact, the expedition that Lubelczyk was part of was funded in part by NASA to help validate their newest Earth-observing satellite, PACE.

In the future, the Bio-GO-SHIP team plans to synthesize community feedback and transform best practices from the pilot phase of this project into sustained measurements on GO-SHIP cruises. The integration of Bio-GO-SHIP with GO-SHIP offers the potential to transform our understanding of hydrography, ocean ecosystems, the biogeochemical roles of plankton, and future changes to the oceans.

Photo: A CTD cast is deployed aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson on a GO-SHIP research cruise earlier this year (Credit: Laura Lubelczyk).