Increasing the utility of data from the Continuous Plankton Recorder survey

A large proportion of the variability in abundance of the copepod Calanus, which is a major food item of larval and adult fish around the British Isles, can be related to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), but causal links have yet to be established. Two possible processes are: changes in wind strength affecting the onset of thermal stratification and hance primary production; and changes in currents transporting Calanus onto the shelf. This project will explicitly test these hypotheses, by using Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey data and established geospatial statistical techniques to examine long-term trends in the abundance of zooplankton taxa in two groups: those that are resident in the North Sea year-round and those whose occurrence is strongly dependent on advective input.