Dr Angus Atkinson

Angus Atkinson joined the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in 2012 from his previous employment (1984-2011) at the British Antarctic Survey. He is interested in all aspects of marine ecology and biogeochemistry, but with main focal areas on plankton and krill species, and particularly in polar regions and in the north Atlantic. Topics of particular interest include Euphausia superba (Antarctic krill); copepods; plankton size structure (biomass spectra); feeding ecology including selectivity; Antarctic, Arctic and north Atlantic food webs; iron cycling by zooplankton; climate warming responses including shifts in phenology, distributional range and body size; and pelagic-benthic coupling via seabed feeding by zooplankton and the biological carbon pump.

To achieve these research objectives, Angus has had a long-standing interest in the generation of long time series which show clues into how real-world zooplankton assemblages have already responded, over multiple decadal timescales, to rapid climate change. To do this he started work at BAS in the 1990s to compile old historical krill records into a central database called KRILLBASE. More recently he has also helped to lead another key time series, collected at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory as part of its Western Channel Observatory (WCO). The plankton observations from this is at weekly resolution and it has been running for over 30 years, offering a super time series, perhaps unique in its resolution.