• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close

AbstractCalcification and biomass production by planktonic marine organisms influences the global carbon cycle and fuels marine ecosystems. The major calcifying plankton group coccolithophores are highly diverse, comprising ca. 250–300 extant species. However, coccolithophore size (a key functional trait) and degree of calcification are poorly quantified, as most of our understanding of this group comes from a small number of species. We generated a novel reference dataset of coccolithophore morphological traits, including cell-specific data for coccosphere and cell size, coccolith size, number of coccoliths per cell, and cellular calcite content. This dataset includes observations from 1074 individual cells and represents 61 species from 25 genera spanning equatorial to temperate coccolithophore populations that were sampled during the Atlantic Meridional Transect (AMT) 14 cruise in 2004. This unique dataset can be used to explore relationships between morphological traits (cell size and cell calcite) and environmental conditions, investigate species-specific and community contributions to pelagic carbonate production, export and plankton biomass, and inform and validate coccolithophore representation in marine ecosystem and biogeochemical models.

CASCADE is a global dataset for 139 extant coccolithophore taxonomic units. CASCADE includes a trait database (size and cellular organic and inorganic carbon contents) and taxonomic-specific global spatiotemporal distributions (Lat/Lon/Depth/Month/Year) of coccolithophore abundance and organic and inorganic carbon stocks. CASCADE covers all ocean basins over the upper 275 meters, spans the years 1964-2019 and includes 33,119 taxonomic-specific abundance observations. Within CASCADE, we characterise the underlying uncertainties due to measurement errors by propagating error estimates between the different studies. Full details of the data set are provided in the associated Scientific Data manuscript. The repository contains five main folders: 1) "Classification", which contains YAML files with synonyms, family-level classifications, and life cycle phase associations and definitions; 2) "Concatenated literature", which contains the merged datasets of size, PIC and POC and which were corrected for taxonomic unit synonyms; 3) "Resampled cellular datasets", which contains the resampled datasets of size, PIC and POC in long format as well as a summary table; 4) "Gridded data sets", which contains gridded datasets of abundance, PIC and POC; 5) "Species lists", which contains spreadsheets of the "common" (>20 obs) and "rare" (<20 obs) species and their number of observations. The CASCADE data set can be easily reproduced using the scripts and data provided in the associated github repository: https://github.com/nanophyto/CASCADE/ (zenodo.12797197) Correspondence to: Joost de Vries, joost.devries@bristol.ac.uk v.0.1.2 has some fixes: 1. The wrongly specified S. neapolitana was removed from synonyms.yml (this species is now S. nana)2. Longitudes were corrected for Guerreiro et al., 20233. A double entry for Dimizia et al., 2015 was fixed4. Units in Sal et al., 2013 were correct to cells/L (previously cells/ml)5. Data from Sal et al., 2013 was re-done, as some species were missing6. Duplicate entries from Baumann et al., 2000 were dropped