The history of Plankton Planet
Plankton Planet (P2) is an ambitious initiative aimed at establishing, by 2030, the first seatizen-based standard measure of the surface ocean microbiome across planetary scales. The P2 strategy rests on three pillars:
- Developing affordable and user-friendly instruments and protocols for consistent field sampling and cutting-edge measurement of aquatic microbial life and related environmental parameters;
- Training ‘seatizens’ to the use of these tools, enabling their widespread and consistent deployment from various platforms such as sailing boats, cargo and navy ships, and marine research stations;
- sharing standardized aquatic micro-biodiversity data and indexes collected locally, in global databases making them accessible for exploration by all stakeholders.
We believe that P2 has the capacity to overcome the main scientific, technological, financial, and regulatory barriers hampering planetary biology, and thus provide a solution that will transform our understanding and forecasting of ocean function, evolution, and health.
Natural water is packed with invisible and highly diverse and complex life (plankton), which makes more than 90% of the ocean biomass and provide vital local and global ecosystem services, such as absorbing carbon, recycling nutrients, or supporting food webs (see the 2024 UN Plankton Manifesto for details 🡕). When impacted by local and/or global changes and pollutions, plankton life can react very quickly by migrating, adapting, evolving, and sometimes threatening humans and ecosystems health with invasive or toxic species. The P2 solution will provide a unique means to consistently and cost-effectively measure plankton biodiversity changes locally (species/populations migration, adaptation, evolution, erosion, extinction); most importantly, the local measures are comparable globally, allowing the design of universal indexes of water health for management and protection based on multiscale, local to global knowledge.
The four main barriers to planetary plankton biology and monitoring are:
- The great biocomplexity of plankton life which thrive across planetary boundaries;
- The cost of use and bulkiness of the oceanographic fleet and of the classical instrumentation used to measure ocean life;
- The heavy and fragmented national and academic legal frameworks related to ocean waters sampling and analyses
- The lack of awareness to the ocean microbiome.
We have overcome the two first barriers by developing state-of-the-art miniaturized and cost-effective technologies and protocols, allowing any seatizen to measure across plankton biodiversity from bacteria to animals. All steps from plankton sampling to biodiversity and contextual data storage in public databases, to analyses and the production of simple indexes of ocean biodiversity and health, are mastered by the network of P2 science world experts. A “proof of concept” study has been successively achieved with the first planetary dataset on plankton biodiversity generated by a fleet of 20 sailing boats (de Vargas et al., Frontiers in Marine Science, 2022).
However, we need to overcome the two last barriers to achieve our goal of creating, by 2030, the first seatizen measure of the surface ocean microbiome across planetary scale. Modular workshops are at the core of our strategy, during which the use of standardized instruments and protocols are taught to the future ‘planktonauts’. As part of the EU-BIOcean5D program, P2 kits are deployed in some 30 Marine Biological Stations along Europe’s coasts. Our goal is to extend this strategy and build up a global network of Marine Stations (there are c.a. 800 of them globally) willing to contribute to the P2 universal measure of ocean microbiomes.
Finally, in order to raise seatizen awareness to the ocean microbiome, P2 has developed the Curiosity-microscope, a miniaturized eco-designed, digital microscope allowing everyone to very easily discover and perform top-quality observations of ocean microbial life.
Shortly after the creation of Plankton Planet, we also founded the association Seatizens for Plankton Planet to help structure the project.