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The Western Channel Observatory (WCO) comprises a series of pelagic, benthic and atmospheric sampling sites within 40 km of Plymouth, UK, that have been sampled by the Plymouth institutes on a regular basis since 1903. This longevity of recording and the high frequency of observations provide a unique combination of data; for example temperature data were first collected in 1903, and the reference station L4, where nearly 400 planktonic taxa have been enumerated, has been sampled on a weekly basis since 1988. While the component datasets have been archived, here we provide the first summary database bringing together a wide suite of the observations. This provides monthly average values of some of the key pelagic and benthic measurements for the inshore site L4 (50 ∘ 15.00 ′ N, 4 ∘ 13.02 ′ W; approx. depth 55 m), the offshore site E1 (50 ∘ 02.00 ′ N, 4 ∘ 22.00 ′ W; approx. depth 75 m) and the intermediate L5 site (50 ∘ 10.80 ′ N, 4 ∘ 18.00 ′ W; approx. depth 58 m). In brief, these data include the following: water temperature (from 1903); macronutrients (from 1934); dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity (from 2008); methane and nitrous oxide (from 2011); chlorophyll a (from 1992); high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-derived pigments (from 1999); <20 µm plankton by flow cytometry, including bacteria (8 functional groups from 2007); phytoplankton by microscopy (6 functional groups from 1992); microplankton and mesozooplankton from FlowCam (6 groups from 2012); Noctiluca sp. dinoflagellate (from 1997); mesozooplankton by microscopy (8 groups from 1988); Calanus helgolandicus egg production rates (from 1992); fish larvae from the Young Fish Trawl survey (4 groups from 1924); benthic macrofauna (4 groups from 2008); demersal fish (19 families from 2008); blue shark, Prionace glauca (from 1958); and 16S alpha diversity for sediment and water column (from 2012). These data have varying coverage with respect to time and depth resolution. The metadata tables describe each dataset and provide pointers to the source data and other related Western Channel Observatory datasets and outputs not compiled here. We provide summaries of the main trends in seasonality and some major climate-related shifts that have been revealed over the last century. The data are available from the Data Archive for Seabed Species and Habitats (DASSH): 10.17031/645110fb81749 (McEvoy and Atkinson, 2023). Making these data fully accessible and including units of both abundance and biomass will stimulate a variety of uptakes. These may include uses as an educational resource for projects, for models and budgets, for the analysis of seasonality and long-term change in a coupled benthic–pelagic system, or for supporting UK and north-eastern Atlantic policy and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author(s): Luke R. Thompson [1, 2, 3]; Jon G. Sanders [1]; Daniel McDonald [1]; Amnon Amir [1]; Joshua Ladau [4]; Kenneth J. Locey [5]; Robert J. Prill [6]; Anupriya Tripathi [...], Our growing awareness of the microbial worlds importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earths microbial diversity.

The Western Channel Observatory (WCO) comprises a series of pelagic, benthic and atmospheric sampling sites within 40 km of Plymouth UK, which have been sampled by the Plymouth Institutes on a regular basis since 1903. This longevity of recording and the high frequency of observations provide a unique combination of data; for example temperature data were first collected in 1903 and the reference station L4 has been sampled on a weekly basis since 1988 where nearly 400 planktonic taxa have been enumerated. While the component datasets have been archived, here we provide the first summary database bringing together a wide suite of the observations. This provides monthly average values of some of the key pelagic and benthic measurements for the inshore site L4 (50° 15.00' N, 4° 13.02' W approx depth 55 m), the offshore site E1 (50° 02.00' N, 4° 22.00' W approx depth 75 m) and the intermediate L5 site (50° 10.80' N 4° 18.00' W approx depth 58 m. In brief, the data include: water temperature (from 1903); macronutrients (from 1934); dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity (from 2008); methane and nitrous oxide (from 2011); chlorophyll a (from 1992); HPLC-derived pigments (from 1999); <20 µm plankton by flow cytometry including bacteria (8 functional groups from 2007); phytoplankton by microscopy (6 functional groups from 1992); microplankton and mesozooplankton from FlowCam (6 groups from 2012), Noctiluca sp. dinoflagellate (from 1997); mesozooplankton by microscopy (8 groups from 1988); Calanus helgolandicus egg production rates (from 1992); fish larvae from Young Fish Trawl survey (4 groups from 1924); benthic macrofauna (4 groups from 2008); demersal fish (19 families from 2008); blue shark, Prionace glauca (from 1958); 16S alpha diversity for sediment and water column (from 2012). These data have varying coverage in time and depth resolution. The metadata tables describe each data set, provide pointers to the source data and other related Western Channel Observatory data sets and outputs not compiled here. We provide summaries of the main trends in seasonality and some major, climate related shifts that have been revealed over the last century. The data are available from Data Archive for Seabed Species and Habitats (DASSH) via the link http://doi.org/10.17031/645110fb81749 (McEvoy and Atkinson, 2023). Making the data fully accessible and including units of both abundance and biomass will stimulate a variety of uptakes. These may include uses as an educational resource for projects, for models and budgets or for analysis of seasonality and long-term change in a coupled benthic-pelagic system and for supporting UK and Northeast Atlantic policy and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, large datasets of in situ marine carbonate system parameters (partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2), total alkalinity, dissolved inorganic carbon and pH) have been collated, quality controlled and made publicly available. These carbonate system datasets have highly variable data density in both space and time, especially in the case of pCO2, which is routinely measured at high frequency using underway measuring systems. This variation in data density can create biases when the data are used, for example for algorithm assessment, favouring datasets or regions with high data density. A common way to overcome data density issues is to bin the data into cells of equal latitude and longitude extent. This leads to bins with spatial areas that are latitude and projection dependent (e. g. become smaller and more elongated as the poles are approached). Additionally, as bin boundaries are defined without reference to the spatial distribution of the data or to geographical features, data clusters may be divided sub-optimally (e. g. a bin covering a region with a strong gradient). To overcome these problems and to provide a tool for matching surface in situ data with satellite, model and climatological data, which often have very different spatiotemporal scales both from the in situ data and from each other, a methodology has been created to group in situ data into 'regions of interest': spatiotemporal cylinders consisting of circles on the Earth's surface extending over a period of time. These regions of interest are optimally adjusted to contain as many in situ measurements as possible. All surface in situ measurements of the same parameter contained in a region of interest are collated, including estimated uncertainties and regional summary statistics. The same grouping is applied to each of the nonin situ datasets in turn, producing a dataset of coincident matchups that are consistent in space and time. About 35 million in situ data points were matched with data from five satellite sources and five model and re-analysis datasets to produce a global matchup dataset of carbonate system data, consisting of ~286,000 regions of interest spanning 54 years from 1957 to 2020. Each region of interest is 100 km in diameter and 10 days in duration. An example application, the reparameterisation of a global total alkalinity algorithm, is shown. This matchup dataset can be updated as and when in situ and other datasets are updated, and similar datasets at finer spatiotemporal scale can be constructed, for example to enable regional studies. The matchup dataset provides users with a large multi-parameter carbonate system dataset containing data from different sources, in one consistent, collated and standardised format suitable for model-data intercomparisons and model evaluations. The OceanSODA-MDB data can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.12770/0dc16d62-05f6-4bbe-9dc4-6d47825a5931 (Land and Piollé, 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]