Dr Clare Ostle

CPR Research Fellow. Co-ordinator Pacific CPR Survey. Chair of GACS.

Clare specialises in marine biogeochemistry (both practically and theoretically), data integration, and data analysis. In particular, her interest’s lie in looking at the plankton community influence on the marine carbonate system and vice versa. Her PhD at the University of East Anglia focussed on how the activity and abundance of plankton may influence the variability of carbon dioxide flux in the North Atlantic. She has worked closely with CPR data since her undergraduate project at Swansea University where she analysed the changes in copepod abundance and distribution with temperature. She also has experience in estimating net community production using oxygen optodes on-board volunteer ships, and is interested in the possibilities of instrument development and sampling enhancements. Clare has been involved in a number of syntheses reports, ranging from topics such as the operationalization of ecological indicators for European marine policy, ocean warming, ocean acidification and marine plastics. In 2020 Clare became the co-ordinator of the Pacific CPR survey. In 2024 Clare became the Chair of the Global Alliance of CPR Surveys (GACS).

Professional affiliations:

UK Pelagic Habitat Expert Group.
Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network (GOA-ON).
Gulf Watch Alaska.
The North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) MONITOR committee member.

Key papers:

Ostle, P. Landschützer, M. Johnson, S. Schmitdko, U. Schuster, A. Watson, M. Edwards, and C. Robinson (2022). Multidecadal changes in biology influence the variability of the North Atlantic carbon sink. Environ. Res. Lett. DOI10.1088/1748-9326/ac9ecf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac9ecf/meta

Ostle,et al.,(2021) The Plankton Lifeform Extraction Tool: A digital tool to increase the discoverability and usability of plankton time-series data, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 1–73, doi:10.5194/essd-2021-171. https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/13/5617/2021/

Ostle, R. Thompson, D. Broughton, L. Gregory, M. Wootton, D. Johns, (2019). The rise in ocean plastics evidenced from a 60-year time series. Nature Comms. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09506-1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09506-1

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