The general goal of the project was to develop a plankton database of the Former Soviet Union expeditions (carried out by the academic research vessels), available to the international scientific community.

The database contains 41 expeditions to the Atlantic Ocean and over 30 expeditions to the enclosed seas of the Atlantic Ocean , including over 30 years of sampling in the Mediterranean Sea , the Black Sea , the Caspian Sea , and the Aral Sea . At present, there is a lack of knowledge on the interannual climate-related variability of zooplankton communities in these regions due to the absence of appropriate databases.

The inventory and the database were created with the assistance of the following institutions:

Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, Ukrainain National Academy of Sciences , Sevastopol , Ukraine

Marine Hydrophysical Institute, Ukrainain National Academy of Sciences
Sevastopol , Ukraine

Caspian Biological Station, Institute of Zoology of Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, Baku , Azerbaijan

Institute of Zoology , Almaty , Kazakhstan

Marine Sciences Research Center , Stony Brook University,

Stony Brook , USA

Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Plymouth , United Kingdom

This work was funded by NSF grant #DEB-0437886.

 

For more information please contact:

 

Sergey Piontkovski

Associate Research Professor

Marine Sciences Research Center

Stony Brook University, Stony Brook , NY 11794-5000 , USA

Tel. (631) 632-8694

Fax (631) 632-8820

spiontkovski@gmail.com

http://www.msrc.sunysb.edu/people/piontkovski.htm