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Plankton Portal
Researcher's In Charge
Bob Cowen, Su Sponaugle, Kelsey Swieca, Moritz Schmid, Adam Greer, Jessica Luo, Jean-Oliver Irisson, Cedric Guigand
Classifications
267
Thoughts on Project
Last year, I studied AP Environmental Science and how the ocean is a huge carbon sink was something that I learned about there. For that reason, it sparked an interest in the topic of carbon sinks since it was something I was already familiar with. The more I looked into the project, I the link to plankton was massive and that interested me which is why I chose to volunteer for this project. This project was very tedious in the sense that you needed to look through the image carefully and be able to distinguish the different structures from one another. Not only are there multiple different types of zooplankton but there also is multiples types of the multiple types of zooplankton. This caused each classification to take a really long time so I wouldn't recommend this project if you either dont have the patience to look through slowly or if you cant see that well. I was able to continue on with this project because it was very enjoyable!
The goal of this project was to understand that no plankton means that there is no life in the ocean. All volunteers are there to help researchers better understand the health of our oceans through plankton! Plankton vary in size from thousandths of an inch to several feet in length. There are two types of them, phytoplankton and zooplankton. In this project, the focus is on zooplankton since those were the ones that are able to be caught well on underwater cameras. There are many different types of zooplankton as well and ones with different structures, even though they are all used for food, they do have different functions in the ocean ecosystem. Plankton is by far the most important food source in the ocean. They also play a big role in the carbon cycle as they act as carbon sinks and together, that makes the ocean able to absorb large amounts of carbon. Researchers need help knowing the types of plankton which are available in the ocean since it helps with not only bettering the software which takes the images now, but by also adding a feature that counts and sorts the plankton as well. Also, because plankton are an important food source and a strong indicator of the health of a marine biome, they can teach us many things about our planet's oceans. Volunteers help with choosing the different types of plankton that are visible in the picture and sorting them into the different types. They are sorted by drawing around the structure.
