Marine and freshwater ecosystems are changing on surprisingly rapid time scales as a function of a diverse suite of forcing functions, both natural and anthropogenic. Plankton are at the base of virtually all aquatic food chains supporting ecosystem function and are particularly relevant to commercially important fisheries.
Vital Time Series Data
Plankton and their resulting breakdown products, called marine snow, directly support global biogeochemical cycling by providing more than half of the oxygen we breathe and the removal of more than half of the carbon produced by burning fossil fuels to the deep sea. Understanding the balance between plankton, their community structure, and the production of marine snow is essential to understanding ecosystem function and the survival of our species. To this end, establishing continuous plankton and marine snow time series at key locations throughout marine and freshwater systems on sampling scales from rapid (seconds) to long-term (decades) will provide a sentinel for ecosystem change. The key is to measure plankton abundance and establish indices of biodiversity at sufficiently fast time scales that allow disentanglement of physical (transport) and biological (growth and reproduction) properties of an ecosystem.
Traditionally, plankton and particle studies are carried out using nets towed through the water, followed by laborious hours in the laboratory under a microscope sorting and identifying plankton by hand. This manual sampling approach precludes the kind of rapid sampling necessary to build continuous indices of biodiversity. Conversely, the CPICS instrument puts the microscope in the water, and along with high- resolution optics and image processing through its companion, DICE, they provide a continuous stream of plankton and particle classifications, size, shape, biovolume, and other data necessary for calculating the contribution of plankton to carbon flux to the deep ocean and lakes.
Fixed Platform Adaptions
Continuous automated plankton classification has been accomplished recently on fixed observing systems, allowing long-term, high-frequency biological measurements that are anti-aliased for physical processes.
The OceanCubes® program was established specifically to provide measurements of biological, chemical, and physical properties of the coastal ocean to capture the response of the plankton community to ecosystem change and to expose and quantify the drivers causing such change.
CPICS and its Deep Learning classification partner, DICE, are manufactured by CoastalOceanVision, Inc. in North Falmouth, MA, and produce high resolution (12 Mpixels) dark-field images in vivid color, 10 times per second and can process thousands of particles per second.
The open-flow design is non-invasive and non-restrictive, providing images of very fragile plankton in their natural orientation. Several magnifications are available from 0.268x to 10x, forming a field of view of ~5 centimeters to ~70 microns, respectively, for imaging the size range of larval fish, adult and larval krill, copepods, nauplii, and microplankton.
For more sensor info, visit: https://www.coastaloceanvision.com/
This spotlight was featured in the 2024-2025 Marine Instruments Buyers’ Guide, read more here.
