The Green Edge cruise: Understanding the onset, life and fate of the Arctic phytoplankton spring bloom

Abstract

Abstract. The Green Edge project was designed to investigate the onset, life and fate of a phytoplankton spring bloom (PSB) in the Arctic Ocean. The lengthening of the ice-free period and the warming of seawater, amongst other factors, have induced major changes in arctic ocean biology over the last decades. Because the PSB is at the base of the Arctic Ocean food chain, it is crucial to understand how changes in the arctic environment will affect it. Green Edge was a large multidisciplinary collaborative project bringing researchers and technicians from 28 different institutions in seven countries, together aiming at understanding these changes and their impacts into the future. The fieldwork for the Green Edge project took place over two years (2015 and 2016) and was carried out from both an ice-camp and a research vessel in the Baffin Bay, canadian arctic. This paper describes the sampling strategy and the data set obtained from the research cruise, which took place aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship (CCGS) Amundsen in spring 2016. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.17882/59892 (Massicotte et al., 2019a).

Arctic phytoplankton spring bloom diversity across the marginal ice zone in Baffin Bay

“…Sea water was sampled at six depths within the euphotic layer at each station, using 12-L Niskin bottles attached to a rosette equipped with a Seabird SBE-911plus CTD unit (Sea-Bird Electronics, Bellevue, WA, USA). The list of the sensors attached to the rosette carousel can be found in Bruyant et al (2022). Three liters of water from each sampling point were pre-filtered with a 100 µ m mesh and subsequently filtered with a peristaltic pump through the following sets of polycarbonate filters: 20 µ m (47 mm), 3 µ m (47 mm), and 0.22 µ m (Sterivex™ filters).…”

“…Environmental variables obtained by other studies during the Green Edge cruise (Lafond et al 2019; Randelhoff et al 2019; Saint-Béat et al 2020) were used here in accordance with our different sectors UI, MIZ and OW. All ancillary physico-chemical and biological data obtained from the Green Edge project used in the present paper is available at http://www.obs-vlfr.fr/proof/php/GREENEDGE/x_datalist_1.php?xxop=greenedge& xxcamp=amundsen as raw data, and at https://www.seanoe.org/data/00487/59892/ (Massicotte et al 2020) as formatted files, and described in detail by Bruyant et al (2022) (see Data Availability section). The complete list of variables sampled during the Amundsen Green Edge cruise, the principal investigator responsible for each data set, and the protocols used to obtain and analyze physical, chemical and biological data can be found in Bruyant et al (2022).…”

“…Physicochemical and biological data from the Green Edge project are available at http://www.obs-vlfr.fr/proof/ php/GREENEDGE/x_datalist_1.php?xxop=greenedge&xxcamp=amundsen and at https://www.seanoe.org/ data/00487/59892/ as described in detail in Bruyant et al (2022). Raw metabarcoding sequences are available under the Accession Code PRJNA810033 from GenBank SRA.…”