HOT OFF THE PRESS. Our first official publication is out!
Read the publication here and check out the awesome microscope images of the species we found:
Our study represents the first attempt to describe the phytoplankton community (who is there, how many are there, how much organic carbon do they contribute) in twelve relatively unexplored coastal sites of the western Antarctic Peninsula over time.
We started this project in 2016 as a collaborative effort with The Polar Citizen Science Collective and International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators – IAATO ships where travelers can participate in real science and help us understand how the base of the food web (phytoplankton) changes each season in Antarctica.
We are incredibly excited to announce that we have officially published the first scientific results from the 2016 – 2017 season in the peer-reviewed journal Polar Biology.
In short, we identified three blooms (aka large numbers of a specific type of phytoplankton), and as far as we know, the first record of an unidentified unarmored dinofagellate bloom on the peninsula. The work had great reviews and good acceptance from the scientific community!
This is graduate student Martina Mascioni‘s first publication as first author – so a huge congratulations to her unlocking a scientific career milestone!
We are all extremely happy with the work, and all of our partners and supporters along the way. This truly could not have been done without you and we have only just begun to partially answer questions about the Antarctic phytoplankton.
We are working hard continuing to process samples and analyze the data from the following 2017 – 2018 and 2018 – 2019 seasons so stay tuned!
This is a first step to sharing this and more information with the scientific, private-sector travel, citizen science, and public communities.
Here is a “SharedIt” link to view online access offered by Springer Nature to allow research articles to be posted anywhere – including social media platforms, websites, and repositories.
If you have any questions, want to know more, please message us.