Zooplankton monitoring to contribute towards addressing global biodiversity conservation challenges

Abstract

Oceanographers have an increasing responsibility to ensure that the outcomes of scientific research are conveyed to the policy-making sphere to achieve conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity. Zooplankton monitoring projects have helped to increase our understanding of the processes by which marine ecosystems respond to climate change and other environmental variations, ranging from regional to global scales, and its scientific value is recognized in the contexts of fisheries, biodiversity and global change studies. Nevertheless, zooplankton data have rarely been used at policy level for conservation and management of marine ecosystems services. One way that this can be pragmatically and effectively achieved is via the development of zooplankton indicators, which could for instance contribute to filling in gaps in the suite of global indicators to track progress against the Aichi Biodiversity Targets of the United Nations Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2010–2020. This article begins by highlighting how under-represented the marine realm is within the current suite of global Aichi Target indicators. We then examine the potential to develop global indicators for relevant Aichi Targets, using existing zooplankton monitoring data, to address global biodiversity conservation challenges.

Metabarcoding Analyses and Seasonality of the Zooplankton Community at BATS

“…Considering both their direct grazing on primary producers and their grazing of other consumers, zooplankton channel 15 to > 50% of the ocean production toward upper trophic levels (Steinberg and Landry, 2017), key for sustaining ecosystems and fisheries. To properly understand the processes affecting or driven by the zooplankton community, a truly knowledge of their taxonomic composition (i.e., biodiversity) is needed (Chiba et al, 2018). For example, species-level identification has allowed the detection of changes in distribution (Beaugrand et al, 2002;Harris et al, 2015;Yoshiki et al, 2015) and phenology (Mackas et al, 2012) associated to climate change.…”

Globally Consistent Quantitative Observations of Planktonic Ecosystems

“…(5) Because of their restricted environmental preferences and relatively short life spans, plankton abundance and composition react tightly to local and global environmental changes (e.g., Mackas and Beaugrand, 2010;Beaugrand et al, 2013Beaugrand et al, , 2015Edwards et al, 2013), and can serve as sentinel organisms of environment and water quality changes, and (6) some planktonic organisms can be toxic or cause disease and parasitism in animals, including commercial ones (Anderson et al, 2019). Given these important functions, the biomass and diversity of phytoplankton and zooplankton were identified as Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) by the Global Ocean Observing System (Chiba et al, 2018;Miloslavich et al, 2018;Muller-Karger et al, 2018;Bax et al, 2019) as well as Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) under GCOS (Global Climate Observing System).…”

A Global Plankton Diversity Monitoring Program

“…Such indicators could be developed and assessed at the regional or basin scale and reported through national mechanisms, enabling direct comparability between seas and national waters and allowing examination of change in a global context. Plankton information including the CPR data are currently not used in the global indicator suites of the current CBD framework or Aichi Targets despite the fact that the CPR's scientific quality and data coverage could exceed the requirement of these indicators (Chiba et al, 2018). This issue may be solved in the post-2020 framework in which a more harmonized collaboration of different UN organizations, such as IOC-GOOS and UNEP, will be expected.…”