Workshop on Best Practices in Ocean Acidification Research and Data Reporting

Last week, approximately 40 scientists from 10 countries met at IFM-GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany to establish an international agreement on best practices for ocean acidification research. The workshop was sponsored by the European Project on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA), the International Ocean Carbon Coordination Project (IOCCP), the US Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry Program (OCB), and the Kiel “Future Ocean” Excellence Cluster. It covered seawater carbonate chemistry, experimental design of perturbation experiments, measurements of CO2-sensitive processes and data reporting and usage.

The participants agreed on the recommendations that would appear in a guide as well as on authors and timelines for drafting each section. While this first workshop was kept necessarily small, the development of the best practices guide is meant to be an open community-wide activity. We invite interested experts to visit the EPOCA web site (
http://epoca-project.eu/
under “Best practices guide”) to review the presentations from the meeting, the timeline for drafting and reviewing the guide, and contacts. The outline of the guide will be uploaded shortly.

Study Warns Ocean Acidification Increases At Alarming Levels

The accelerated increase in atmospheric CO2 resulted from fossil fuel burning, deforestation, and other human activities, trigger serious consequences on marine ecosystems, scientists from the University of Chicago warned in a recent report published in PNAS.

As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the ocean pH changes, which impacts the marine organisms living here. The pH is important for mediating physiological reactions, the researchers explained, and is critical for a lot of processes in the ocean.

A declining pH could interfere with reef building, carbon sequestration via phytoplankton sedimentation, and consumer-resource interactions. Furthermore, the organisms that are most likely to suffer from these changes are the calcifying organisms such as corals, mollusks, coralline algae, and phytoplankton.