PlanktoScope: Affordable Modular Quantitative Imaging Platform for Citizen Oceanography

Abstract

The oceans represent 97% of all water on Earth and contain microscopic, drifting life, plankton, which drives global biogeochemical cycles. A major hurdle in assessing marine plankton is the planetary scale of the oceans and the logistical and economic constraints associated with their sampling. This difficulty is reflected in the limited amount of scientifically equipped fleets and affordable equipment. Here we present a modular hardware/software open-source strategy for building a versatile, re-configurable imaging platform - the PlanktoScope - that can be adapted to a number of applications in aquatic biology and ecology. We demonstrate high-throughput quantitative imaging of laboratory and field plankton samples while enabling rapid device reconfiguration to match the evolving needs of the sampler. The presented versions of PlanktoScope are capable of autonomously imaging 1.7 ml per minute with a 2.8 µm/px resolution and can be controlled from any WiFi-enabled device. The PlanktoScope’s small size, ease of use, and low cost - under $1000 in parts - enable its deployment for customizable monitoring of laboratory cultures or natural micro-plankton communities. This also paves the way toward consistent and long-term measurement of plankton diversity by an international fleet of citizen vessels at the planetary scale.

Plankton Planet: A frugal, cooperative measure of aquatic life at the planetary scale

“…Over the last few years, we have thus developed the PlanktoScope (see companion papers by Pollina et al, 2022 andMeŕiguet et al, 2022), an affordable, miniaturized, modular and evolvable, open source imaging platform for citizen oceanography. For a cost of less than 1000 US$ in parts, the PlanktoScope allows both quantitative imaging of microplankton communities through a fluidic module before their storage for total DNA/ RNA extraction and genetic analyses in the lab, and high-quality imaging/filming of individual cells or organisms under different types of illumination.…”

“…Today we have developed all parts to assemble a stable P2 PlanktoKit 1.0 allowing any engaged seatizen to generate consistent plankton eco/morpho/genetic data directly in the field. The PlanktoKit 1.0, which costs less than $3,000 in parts, consists of a cruising-speed plankton collection system (von Ammon et al, 2020), a PlanktoScope (Pollina et al, 2022), a new cost-effective plankton DNA collection-kit we call the 'Lamprey', and a tablet computer to drive the PlanktoScope, record all contextual and meta-data, and visualize and record plankton images and movies. We have shown that these frugal tools deployed from sailing boats can generate consistent, planetary scale genetic (this paper) and morphological (Meŕiguet et al, 2022) data, paving the way for the Plankton Planet vision (Box 1).…”

“…At the core of our long-term vision, the principles applied to development of the PlanktoScope (Pollina et al, 2022) should be extended to co-construct a field-AquaScope for seatizen exploration of aquatic eco-systems, and the concept could be easily applied for the exploration of other planetary biomes. We foresee the field-AquaScope as a miniaturized platform that can host modules and sensors to measure the critical biological, but also (bio)chemical, and physical parameters of any aquatic ecosystem.…”

“…plastics, pollutants, Tornero and Hanke, 2016;Jacquin et al, 2019) and global (e.g. deoxygenation, warming, acidification, freshening, ocean circulation changes (Hays et al, 2005;Pörtner et al, 2019) anthropogenic pressures on our ocean, we urgently need global plankton surveys that merge the spatio-temporal sampling power of the CPR with the systems-biology approach of Tara Oceans. Only application of a comprehensive and homogenous measure of plankton life from micro-to meso-to global ocean scales (Follows et al, 2007;Levy et al, 2018;Lombard et al, 2019) will provide the data necessary not only to unveil fundamental principles of ecology and evolution of marine life at the ecosystem level of organization, but also to feed mathematical models of the ocean system that integrate physical, chemical, and biological processes 'Seatizen' oceanography to change scale A long-term measure of the ocean microbiome across planetary scales is hindered by the extreme cost and limited logistical flexibility of classical oceanographic research vessels and instruments, together with the current impossibility to use autonomous samplers (e.g.…”

“…We show how 20 pioneer crews of citizen sailorsthe 'planktonauts'-, equipped with a simple kit to sample plankton for DNA-metabarcoding, were able to help generate a scientifically sound, planetary dataset of plankton biodiversity in less than a year. We finally discuss recent developments (see also Pollina et al, 2022), as well as the 'Plankton Planet' perspectives toward planetary-scale deployment of integrated, affordable and portable 'field-AquaScopes' for longterm assessment of aquatic life and ecosystems at an unprecedented level of sensitivity.…”