Organizer: Marine Biodiversity Observation (MBON)

Much life in the sea depends on plankton diversity and production. As the ocean changes, the many ecosystem functions of plankton - their biodiversity, distribution, nutrient and carbon flows, timing of life stages and blooms - change in ways that also alter ecosystem services that other organisms, including humans, depend on. There is a need to better understand and predict how these ecosystem functions of the plankton community change on different time scales. Justifying comprehensive regional and global studies of the role of plankton biodiversity and ecosystem function will require understanding the importance of plankton in an ecosystem services framework. This series of virtual workshops brings scientists together to provide an overview on the state-of-the-art of field, lab and modelling approaches used to study plankton biodiversity and discuss data needs for improving our understanding on the value of plankton, its functions and ecosystem services. A goal is to align multiple research tools and approaches, data, methods, protocols and knowledge to improve ecological forecasting. This alignment is important to meet the goals of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (the Ocean Decade) through programs like Marine Life 2030, Digital Twins of the Ocean - DITTO, and Ocean Practices for the Decade.

The report for the first MODIV-MBON workshop is available here

Key objectives

The workshops will emphasize on:

  1. Data availability, accessibility and use, specifically: (i) data types necessary for exploring the effect of plankton biodiversity on ecosystem functions, (ii) improving our ability to link field observations and models.

  2. Value of plankton from an ecological, biogeochemical, cultural, and economic perspective.


Expected outcomes

The goal of the workshops is to develop two international working groups to:

  1. Develop community-agreed unit conversion tables (e.g., abundance to carbon) published as best practices documents and/or available as online tools, important for forecasting and global data metaanalysis.

  2. Write a synthesis paper on the ecological, biogeochemical, economic and recreational value of plankton with colleagues from different fields and regions for a global perspective.


Participants will propose research actions, each linked to specific efforts for a multidisciplinary approach to the proposed topics (e.g., biological oceanography, data science, education, citizen science, policy, socioeconomics, arts).


Workshop participation:

The first workshop, supported by MBON, MODIV and OO RCN took place on November 9-10, 2020, with participants from Europe and the USA. The upcoming workshops in October 2021 seek to expand the geographic representation of participants and we are thus encouraging researchers from Africa, Asia, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, India and Oceania to join us in this collective effort.


Each workshop will gather a diverse group of around 25 participants, each with recognized expertise on their field of interest. Three virtual workshops will be held during the following time zones:

  • UTC-9 to UTC- 5: Latin America and Canada

  • UTC to UTC + 6: Africa, Europe, Middle East, India

  • UTC + 7 to UTC + 12: Asia, Oceania


Organizing committee:

  • Esteban Acevedo-Trejos

  • Clarissa Anderson

  • Jason Everett

  • Maria Grigoratou

  • Enrique Montes

  • Frank Muller- Karger

  • Renato Quinones

  • Anthony Richardson

  • Meike Vogt

  • Soultana Zervoudaki