Plankton, basically!

We request ship time on the R/V Endeavor in Spring or Summer 2025 to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a proposed marine carbon dioxide removal technique (mCDR) referred to as ‘Alkalinity Enhancement’. While effective from a physical and chemical stand point, it is unclear to what degree the manipulation affects the health and physiology of marine plankton, the base of the food web and engines of global biogeochemical cycles. Our work leverages a 6-year time series which established the baseline structure and function of planktonic food web in coastal Rhode Island (Fig. 1) through the established North East Shelf Long Term Ecological Research site(NES-LTER). Specifically, we will be conducting feeding and carbonate chemistry experiments along a shore to shelf transect (yellow highlight in Figure 1) to concurrently examine seawater chemistry and biological processes. This work is being done as a field trial of an existing ARPA-e (DoD) pilot grant Wang and Menden-Deuer have and that we wish to expand into a larger effort with the National Science Foundation.