Plymouth Marine Laboratory was successful in the Seventh round of the Darwin Initiative for the Survival of Species (Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions).

The main aim of the Darwin Initiative is to use British scientific, educational and commercial strengths in knowledge and expertise to assist countries poor in financial resources but rich in biodiversity to understand, conserve and sustain their natural habitats. Twenty-six new projects were funded from a submission of more than 175. Bob Williams (Honorary Research Fellow) is project leader for "Plankton diversity and biovariability in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans". The project is for 3 years duration and at 161K GBP funding level. This takes the total of funded projects to 6, where PML is the lead organisation, since the launch of the Darwin Initiative following the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.

The project on plankton biodiversity involves Institutes from Sevastopol, Ukraine (Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas and the Marine Hydrophysical Institute), Panama (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) and Mombasa, Kenya (Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute). Staff at PML will welcome back Sergey Piontkovski (IBSS) and Alexey Mishonov (MHI) during the period of the project, both of whom have spent periods working in the Laboratory on previous grants. The picture below on right shows the three of us finalising the submission in a local Plymouth Barbican hostelry. Our project objectives are to set up co-operation between the 5 Institutes to rescue and compile oceanographic data sets and to release them on CD-ROM and the World Wide Web. We hope to focus international attention on the biodiversity and biovariability of the tropical zones of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and to provide training in the UK for scientists from the Institutes. We intend to improve the information base at the genus and species levels and to focus on providing archival data for further analysis where it may have wider impact and especially to develop new tools for presentation, analysis and dissemination.
At present, there is a need to understand and quantify changes in biodiversity in marine ecosystems, throughout a wide range of spatial-temporal scales. This requirement is incorporated in the implementation plans of a number of international programmes (GLOBEC, JGOFS, CLIVAR etc). These programmes have emphasised that our knowledge on biodiversity and biovariability throughout the range of scales is still extremely sparse. The macroscale variability of biodiversity (thousands of km, several months) and the synoptic variability of biodiversity (hundreds of km, several weeks) of the ocean are the most poorly studied ranges in the ecological continuum of spatial-temporal scales. Publications concerning these issues are few although historical data already exists in various Institutes, which are available for analysis. The majority of western scientists are not aware of the number of extremely detailed surveys carried out in the oceans by the Former Soviet Union (1961-1993). A map showing the station positions sampled during the 10 expeditions to the Indian Ocean and over 20 expeditions to the Atlantic Ocean is given. The evaluation and modern analysis of these data can fill the gap in our knowledge on biodiversity and its variability in the macro- and synoptic scale. The collected information partly remains within archives in Ukraine and Russia. These data will be integrated with the data from Panama and Kenya, which could be added to the results from recent expeditions by USA, UK and The Netherlands to form a very comprehensive database. We hope that these data can be used to provide insights into the multiscale patterns of biodiversity changes in these major pelagic ecosystems.

AGENDA
Present: R. Williams (PML, UK), A. Mishonov (PML, UK), V. Myroshnychenko (MHI, Ukraine), M. Osore (KMRFI, Kenya)

• Achieve the final form of the CD-ROM (where A. Mishonov should mount scientific papers and chapters written). Deadline: February 15, 2002;
• Translate chapters written in Russian so far, and to mount them on the CD-ROM and the website. Deadline: February 1, 2002;
• Mount all the project data on the web. Deadline: October 30, 2001.

REPORT

The Project training meeting was successfully completed at PML from April 22nd to 29th, 2001.

The purpose of the meeting was for training of the representatives of the participating Institutions from Kenya and Ukraine on data management, data dissemination and web-site creation and the familiarisation of all colleagues on what had been completed to date.

Mr. M. Osore, Mr. V. Myroshnychenko, Dr. A. Mishonov, and R. Williams spent 5 very busy days working together on the project's issues. A representative from Panama was not able to attend, but all their data, as well as scientific papers, were submitted via e-mail.

Project Leader R. Williams (UK) made overview of the Project State and all participants have presented their achievements.

During this meeting the draft version of the project's CD-ROM was released and all participants were trained to work with the developed software and how the data were linked. They were also involved in the data quality control and software testing. Mr. V. Myroshnychenko was able to correct some minor software bugs, which were found during software-testing phase.

Dr. A. Mishonov presented a report on the preliminary version of the project's web-site. During this meeting the project web-site was established on the PML server. All information from the pilot web-site, which was based on a commercial web-hosting server, was transferred onto the PML-based server. Participants were able to make their contribution into the web-site content and familiarise themselves on web-design.

Mr. M. Osore presented to the participants the Kenyan data and its format and content was discussed. Some remarks were made about metadata and it was agreed that KMFRI would provide information on the exact location of their near-shore sampling sites within their database.

Broad discussions and informal communications during this meeting allows participants to exchange and contribute their ideas regarding to 2001 project report as well as future collaboration.