UCSB Press Release–Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, NASA, and other institutions announced at a telephone press conference today the discovery of a method to determine from outer space the productivity of marine phytoplankton—a breakthrough that may provide a new understanding of life in the world’s oceans.
The new approach is based on the premise that the “greenness” in phytoplankton, its level of pigmentation per cell, is a reflection of its growth rate, said David Siegel, professor of geography and director of the Institute for Computational Earth System Science at UCSB. The researchers have discovered a means, by satellite, to measure the biomass of phytoplankton from ocean light-scattering properties, and to infer growth rates from simultaneous measurements of the greenness of the individual phytoplankton cells.
