Current research activities
The COMPLEx team studies the ecology of marine plankton and the oceanic components of biogeochemical cycles. To performs such studies, we develop quantitative imaging approaches and use metagenomics, at sea and in the laboratory.
The team’s research is focused on three questions:
The team studies the relationships between hydrology, biogeochemistry, plankton and organic particles, in global data sets and in long term time series.
In addition to characterizing the abundance of plastics, the team is interested in the communities attached to them and drift with them.
The team conducts approaches based on functional traits, extracted from imagery and metagenomic data.
tools
To carry out its research, the team uses three types of tools:
such as the UVP (deployed at sea) and the ZooScan (used in the laboratory) as well as associated software, such as ZooProcess and EcoTaxa. We coordinate the activities of the imagery platform, which implements these tools at IMEV, and of the Plankton Collection Center J-C Pomerol, which stores the corresponding physical samples.
in France and abroad, in order to use together the data that they generate.
to accelerate the classification of images, the assignment of functions to sequences, the detection of correlations at large scales, etc.
COMPLEX
A little bit of history...
The diversity of plankton in the bay of Villefranche is the reason why a marine station was established there in the 19th century. Systematic monitoring of these populations with traditional methods began in 1966. In the early 1990s, researchers and engineers in Villefranche began to create instruments to record and analyze images of plankton in the ocean and in the laboratory. Those are now used for the weekly plankton monitoring time series carried out in the bay and are part of numerous oceanographic campaigns. Since 2009, quantitative plankton imaging has been coupled with metagenomics through the Tara Oceans campaigns, providing access to rich and complex information that the team now exploits, in collaboration with research groups in France and abroad.
