Backed by a £3.75million award from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) - the UK Government's new high-risk, high-reward funding agency - the CANARY project, led by researchers at the Marine Biological Association and University of Plymouth, is set to revolutionise climate forecasting by focusing on plankton as the "canaries in the coalmine" of ocean health.
Plankton are the ocean's pulse - microscopic organisms that fuel entire ecosystems, drive global carbon cycles, and respond rapidly to environmental shifts - making them powerful early-warning indicators of impending climate tipping points.
At the heart of CANARY is an ambitious vision that merges cutting-edge plankton imaging technologies with AI-powered data pipelines. The project aims to establish an innovative, scalable, and sustainable system to track plankton dynamics across climate-sensitive regions such as Greenland and Iceland.
- Advanced Sensing: AI-integrated holographic plankton imaging will be deployed in constellation deployments using commercial vessels ("ships of opportunity" such as ferries or container ships), newly developed autonomous underwater robots, and even as biologging tags attached to filter-feeding ocean giants, such as whales.
- Data Integration: CANARY will integrate these new sensing systems with longstanding global plankton monitoring data, notably building on the legacy of the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) Survey based at the MBA.
The project is led by a team of ARIA R&D Creators:
- Dr Lilian Lieber, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth and Research Fellow at the Marine Biological Association, and Professor Alex Nimmo Smith, Professor of Marine Science and Technology at the University of Plymouth, will lead on sensor innovation and new platform deployments;
- Dr Clare Ostle, CPR Survey Research Fellow at the Marine Biological Association, will lead on the environmental forecasting of plankton as part of the early warning system.
The team also brings together technical specialists, data engineers, and operational experts with decades of experience in building new sensing systems, establishing CPR routes, and populating global plankton data repositories.
A key element of CANARY is its collaboration with Blue Ocean Marine Tech Systems, who will deploy next-generation autonomous underwater robots. These robots are engineered to glide through the water column and deliver near real-time observations in rapidly changing regions of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre.
With a rich legacy of pioneering ocean research, Plymouth is recognised as a global centre of excellence in plankton science. It is also at the forefront of marine technology innovation, bringing together leading research institutions and industry partners to develop cutting-edge solutions for ocean observing and sustainability.
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