Seatizens for Plankton Planet: teaching and deploying cost-effective tools to monitor world's plankton with seafarers and sea users

The ocean is brimming with mostly invisible, highly diverse forms of life: plankton. These microscopic organisms play a key role in the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, and a growing body of evidence highlights their significant impact on global biogeochemical processes and climate regulation. Tracking plankton biodiversity at local, regional and global levels is therefore essential to understand their distribution, evolution and responses to environmental changes, as well as their influence on climate regulation. However, planetary ocean microbiology remains a challenge due to the vast extent of the ocean on one hand, and to the high costs and administrative complexity of oceanographic vessels on the other. In order to unlock a global and continuous measure of plankton, the Plankton Planet initiative, embodied in the Seatizens for Plankton Planet NGO, develops a new generation of cost-effective, robust, simple-to-use instruments and protocols for citizen science, that allow “seatizens” (seafarers eager to observe and better understand the ocean) to measure the genetic and morphological diversity of plankton. At the core of the initiative are world experts in ocean life science, which ensures the scientific quality and relevance of the measures. The instruments, conceived within Plankton Planet and developed by emerging startups, are designed to be used on sailing boats and can be deployed on larger platforms at sea or on shore. The collaborative engagement with “seatizens”, and their training to obtain rigorous and consistent data, is a critical component of the project. This interaction introduces an additional challenge for scientists, who must embrace different mind-sets and develop innovative ways to work and collaborate with non-professional scientists. By engaging “seatizens” in the global monitoring of the aquatic microbiome, the Plankton Planet initiative sets the basis for significantly expanding observations that inform predictive models of the ocean. Microbiodiversity is the ultimate parameter that needs to be integrated into Ocean and Earth system models if we want to better understand and protect planetary health.