BIOS-SCOPE

The BIOS-SCOPE team mission is to advance an understanding of ocean food web sources, sinks and transformations of dissolved and particulate organic matter in the context of defining characteristics of the seasonally oligotrophic Sargasso Sea. The location of the BIOS-SCOPE study, the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site, experiences vigorous physical mixing in winter / spring followed by quiescent and stratified periods in the summer / early fall that results in both spring phytoplankton blooms and extremely low-nutrient surface conditions in each annual cycle. The dramatic seasonality of BATS makes it an excellent site for exploring features of biogeochemistry related to ocean mixing and stratification, and for exploring the long-term consequences of ocean surface warming. This study site supports the longest running open ocean metagenomics time-series in oceanography northwestern Sargasso Sea. In its third phase the BIOS-SCOPE team is poised to integrate its range of skills to investigate specific mechanisms of organic matter production, oxidation and transformation in both DOM and POM. New metagenomic, transcriptomic and proteomic approaches will be used to further explore microbial ecology in this oligotrophic system and how it controls biogeochemical cycling.