One of the easiest ways to quickly represent the amount or biomass of the entire zooplankton community is to measure the mass or volume of everything caught in the net as a single lump sum.
While technically these data include both "biomass" (e.g., "total sample wet mass", "total sample dry mass") and "biovolume" (e.g., "total sample displacement volume", "total sample settled volume") measurements, COPEPOD refers to these data generically as "zooplankton biomass".
Breakdown of data currently available:
- 65% "total displacement volume" method;
- 25% "total wet mass" method;
- 6% "total settled volume" method;
- 3% "total dry mass" method.
Data from these four main zooplankton biomass types were combined into global-scale 1/4-degree latitude/longitude fields.
As none of these individual types offered full global coverage by themselves, a global field was created by converting each of these fields into "carbon mass" (using published conversion rates) and then combining all four of them into a single global "zooplankton carbon mass" field.
A detailed summary of the methodology in creating these fields is described in Moriarty & O'Brien 2013 (go to this publication).
If you are looking for gridded mean fields of zooplankton biomass, click here or the biomass map image above.
If you are looking for a compilation of raw (ungridded) zooplankton biomass data,
you can find these in the "Atlas" (biomass compilations) area.
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