Albert Calbet – författare

Explore the captivating world of plankton with this hands-on guide, perfect for students, educators, hobbyists, and citizen scientists alike.

"Plankton in a Changing World: The Impact of Global Change on Marine Ecosystems" invites readers to explore the microscopic hidden world beneath the waves.

This book is a mechanism-first guide to how the sea actually works. Instead of lists of species and case studies, it teaches the rules—light, viscosity, turbulence, temperature, oxygen, pressure, and elemental budgets—and the devices organisms use to play by them: filters and houses, pellets and gels, pigments and transporters, and migrations and dormancy. You will learn to read edges and thin layers (microlayer, thermoclines, deep chlorophyll maximums, oxygen minimum zone rims, and submesoscale fronts), to see how carbon is routed—recycled aloft or exported at depth—by mineral ballast, gelatinous packaging, and the active pump of diel migrants. Climate change and acidification appear where they truly act (on viscosity, oxygen margins, and saturation horizons), while molecular and genomic ecology grounds traits in genes, transcripts, proteins, and metabolites. Throughout, the emphasis is on rate coupling, clean inference, and portable field signatures—size spectra, pellet fall speeds, acoustic and optical cues—you can test at sea.Written in clear, quantitative prose with only the math the argument needs, The Ocean’s Operating System: The Mechanisms, Materials, and Rules Driving Marine Planktonic Life equips researchers, advanced students, modelers, and managers to move from a handful of measurements (light profiles, microstructure, temperature salinity, simple optics and chemistry) to community strategies, carbon routing, and flux. If you want a transferable toolkit—one you can carry from shelf to gyre, from polar ice to urban plumes—to predict “who will win, what will happen, and why,” this is your field manual for reading, and using, the code that runs the ocean.

This book is a mechanism-first guide to how the sea actually works. Instead of lists of species and case studies, it teaches the rules—light, viscosity, turbulence, temperature, oxygen, pressure, and elemental budgets—and the devices organisms use to play by them: filters and houses, pellets and gels, pigments and transporters, and migrations and dormancy. You will learn to read edges and thin layers (microlayer, thermoclines, deep chlorophyll maximums, oxygen minimum zone rims, and submesoscale fronts), to see how carbon is routed—recycled aloft or exported at depth—by mineral ballast, gelatinous packaging, and the active pump of diel migrants. Climate change and acidification appear where they truly act (on viscosity, oxygen margins, and saturation horizons), while molecular and genomic ecology grounds traits in genes, transcripts, proteins, and metabolites. Throughout, the emphasis is on rate coupling, clean inference, and portable field signatures—size spectra, pellet fall speeds, acoustic and optical cues—you can test at sea.Written in clear, quantitative prose with only the math the argument needs, The Ocean’s Operating System: The Mechanisms, Materials, and Rules Driving Marine Planktonic Life equips researchers, advanced students, modelers, and managers to move from a handful of measurements (light profiles, microstructure, temperature salinity, simple optics and chemistry) to community strategies, carbon routing, and flux. If you want a transferable toolkit—one you can carry from shelf to gyre, from polar ice to urban plumes—to predict “who will win, what will happen, and why,” this is your field manual for reading, and using, the code that runs the ocean.

In just a small spoonful of seawater, we can find around fifty million viruses, five million bacteria, hundreds of thousands of small unicellular flagellates, thousands of microscopic algae, five heterotrophic ciliates or dinoflagellates, and, with some luck, a small crustacean like copepods.

Explore the captivating world of plankton with this hands-on guide, perfect for students, educators, hobbyists, and citizen scientists alike. Designed to take you through every step of the process, from collecting samples in local waters to observing them under a microscope and conducting basic experiments, this guide will equip you with the tools and knowledge needed to study plankton at home. You will gain an understanding of the different groups of plankton, their ecological significance, and the environmental challenges they face. With practical advice on gathering and preserving samples, using essential equipment, and identifying common groups, the book also introduces simple experimental techniques to investigate plankton behavior and ecology. For those looking for further knowledge, it briefly covers advanced methods like DNA barcoding and environmental DNA analysis. An image guide, at the end of the book, for easy identification makes this a comprehensive resource. By the end of the reading, you will be ready to deepen your exploration of these vital organisms and perhaps even contribute to their study.