CEA presented 1 platform and 9 posters at SETAC Seville in May 2024. We will be showcasing each of these presentations in a series of ‘SETAC Spotlight’ articles. This week it is:
SETAC Spotlight: The Microscopic world: A comparison of different techniques for quantifying plankton
Authors: Marie Brown1, Ellie Welch1, Zoe Parker-Crosse1, Nadine Taylor1, Valeria Manifredi2
1Cambridge Environmental Assessments, Boxworth, UK, 2University of Nottingham.
Plankton communities are integral to freshwater ecosystems. However, due to their small size, very short life cycles and dynamic ecological and environmental interactions, assessing these organisms on a community level can be very challenging. The presence of a stressor, such as a plant protection product (PPP), within the ecosystem creates an additional layer of complexity. Necessarily large datasets, acquired from samples collected over large temporal scale are required to decipher true direct and indirect effects against the dynamic natural changes to abundance. Traditionally, these communities are generally assessed using taxonomy techniques, however, there are new and emerging techniques for quantifying these microscopic organisms. When designing a study to investigate the impacts of a PPP on plankton, consideration must be given to the ecology and biology of these organisms, to ensure that appropriate methods are used for data collection. Freshwater phytoplankton cells vary in size by several orders of magnitude between species with any taxa recorded as colonies resulting in the biggest variation in size. Biovolume measurements can be used to adjust for this variation in size by calculating the total volume of each taxa and can be useful for assessing the functionality of individual species or groups, for assessing changes in morphology and for collecting data on algae taxa classed as colonies where it is difficult to distinguish individual cells. Abundance counts are able to show more subtle changes in the community structure, and these data are considered to be more standardized and statistically robust. Current standard practice for such measurements requires laborious microscopy techniques and expert taxonomic training, limiting the frequency and number of samples that can be processed. The development of metabarcoding techniques could provide an alternative, more efficient, method. Molecular analyses could be used in conjunction with microscopy identification, or as a complete separate analysis, to show variation in plankton communities as a large number of samples can be analyzed very quickly.
Here we present the benefits of reporting data from microscopy counts in terms of abundance or biovolume, and we introduce a comparison of traditional approaches against molecular data from a metabarcoding technique.
Follow this link to see our poster on this topic presented at SETAC 2024.
You can read our previous news article on this topic via this link.
If you would like to discuss any of the topics raised in this article, feel free to contact us.
This poster is available for free download.
You can find all of the other posters that CEA presented at SETAC Seville here. You can also find all of our publications from previous conferences and links to journal articles we have authored on our library page.
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