NOSOAT Floating Summer School

This collection describes some of the results of the ‘Floating summer school’ on board the research vessel Polarstern (funding number AWI-PS95-00) in which a team of students and their instructors collected physical, biological and chemical oceanographic data along a massive biogeographic gradient from the North Sea to South Africa. The biological parameters analysed included, among others, the abundance and species composition of zoo- and phytoplankton. The phytoplankton was collected from Niskin samplers as well as vertical net hauls with 20 and µm net. Here we show phytoplankton data image meta data from all sampled stations. The sampling stations along our cruise track covered a range of distinct biogeographic provinces and different habitats and these are reflected in the enormous diversity of organisms we encountered. The majority of images have been taken from live and Formalin-fixed net samples but Lugol-fixed images documenting the quantitative studies at each station have also been included. In addition to taxa identified to species level, the collection also contains a large number of unidentified taxa. Although we could not name them they could be consistently identified as discrete units and therefore were included in semiquantitative/quantitative biodiversity assessments. We document them here as metadata to facilitate comparative counts in future cruises. The cruise was jointly funded by the AWI by the AW, SMART (Strategic Alliance for Research and Training) and POGO (Partnership for observation of the global ocean)