Overview
The balance between the production of organic carbon during phytoplankton photosynthesis and its consumption by
bacterial, zooplankton and phytoplankton respiration determines how much carbon can be stored in the ocean and how
much remains in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The amount of organic carbon stored in the ocean is as large as the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and so is a key component in two global carbon cycle calculations needed to
avoid a global temperature rise of more than 1.5 degrees C: the calculation of the technological and societal efforts
required to achieve net zero carbon emissions and the calculation of the efficiency of ocean-based engineering approaches
to directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Yet, despite its vital role, our ability to predict how ocean carbon storage will change in the future is severely limited by our
lack of understanding of how plankton respiration varies in time and space, how it is apportioned between bacteria and
zooplankton and how sensitive it is to climate change-induced shifts in environmental conditions such as increasing
temperature and decreasing oxygen. This woeful situation is due to the significant challenge of measuring respiration in the
deep-sea and the uncoordinated way in which these respiration data are archived.
The MicroRESPIRE + ReMO initiative aims to reduce the knowledge gaps surrounding the variability and factors affecting the variability of plankton respiration by creating a global open-access database of respiration.
ReMO (Respiration in the Mesopelagic Ocean): Reconciling ecological, biogeochemical and model estimates is a working group (#161) of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR).
The production of an open-access database of respiration contributes to the second Term of Reference of the ReMO working group - to develop a global dataset of mesopelagic respiration estimates, derived from the range of ecological and biogeochemical techniques available, in order to create a resource for validation of biogeochemical models including Earth System Models used for climate projection. The dataset will be registered for a DOI through the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC), launched at an international conference, and written up as a data paper perhaps to the journal Earth System Science Data. Data contributors have the option to be co-authors of this publication.
MicroRESPIRE is a NERC funded research project.
The production of an open-access database of respiration will contribute to two of the three objectives of MicroRESPIRE - to determine how respiration varies in space and time, and how it is apportioned between microbes and zooplankton. One deliverable of the project is to produce a publication based on the database which addresses these two objectives. Data contributors have the option to be co-authors of this publication.
It is envisaged that this will be the same paper as that prepared for ReMO as detailed above.