Commission funds 67-year-old project
The core programme of the continuous plankton recorder (CPR) survey operated by the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for ocean science in Plymouth, UK, is to receive funding from the European Commission's MAST programme in 1999. The survey, which began in 1931, is possibly one of the world's longest running monitoring programmes in the field of marine biology and is the only one that operates on an ocean-basin scale. The project's main asset is its large database containing analytical results from nearly 200,000 plankton samples. Through EU support, other EU-funded projects in this field will have access to the database, which is a valuable resource for analysing long-term trends in the dynamics of the ecosystem in the North Atlantic. Indeed, the CPR data has assisted a number of recent discoveries, linking CPR data with Atlantic basin-wide hydrometeorological signals. The patterns revealed in the CPR data may also have implications for terrestrial and freshwater environments in north-west Europe. The EU-MAST contribution to the CPR survey will support research on plankton biodiversity and the relationships between plankton and the environment. It will also facilitate the incorporation of new technology in the survey and enable the project to play an important role in international programmes, such as the Global Ocean Observing System. The database will be an essential element of the EUROGLOBEC Science Plan, which provides the basis for an EU contribution to the international core project GLOBEC within the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme. This has recently been published by the European Commission at: URL: http://europa.eu.int/comm/dg12/envsc/download.html#euroglobec(opens in new window) The plan also forms part of the Key Action on sustainable marine ecosystems, which forms part of the European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration.