Announcement of the CPR training Course
Efforts towards identifying and efficiently adapting to the forthcoming environmental changes, is hampered by a lack of suitable and cost effective monitoring systems. The PERSEUS FP7 project aspires to contribute to this challenge by enabling capacity building of long term plankton monitoring in the Southern European Seas through the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey. To this end a call is open to apply for attending a Training Course on the Implementation of the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) within the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The course will take place at The Cyprus Institute (CyI- www.cyi.ac.cy), Nicosia, Cyprus, September 28th-30th, 2015. Please see the attached document for information and an application form. The deadline for applications is June 20th, 2015.
RATIONALE
The proposed training course aims to establish a native (Mediterranean) capacity in operating the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR). This objective is especially significant considering that, despite the CPR protocol and equipment being designed almost a century ago, with routine CPR collections in the North Sea kicking off in 1931, it has, since then, been mainly deployed in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
By fostering such a native CPR-handling capacity, PERSEUS seeks to address the glaring lacuna of any considerable CPR deployment within the Mediterranean by scientists, and has sown the seeds for future regular CPR-mediated plankton monitoring efforts in the same Basin and in the Black Sea.