Long-term ocean sampling in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay reveals plummeting plankton levels: impact uncertain for local food web

Digitizing decades worth of pre-computer files held in storage at the Narragansett Bay campus let oceanographers at the University of Rhode Island get a better picture of Narragansett Bay over time. URI operates the longest-running time series in Rhode Island, which now reveals that the level of phytoplankton in the bay has dropped by half in the last half century.

Papers Explore Massive Plankton Blooms with Very Different Ecosystem Impacts

Two new papers explore this question and provide examples of conditions that lead to massive plankton blooms with vastly different potential impacts on the ecosystem, according to McGillicuddy, co-author of both papers. Both papers also point to importance of using advanced technology—including Video Plankton Recorders, autonomous underwater vehicles, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative’s Coastal Pioneer Array—to find and monitor these blooms.