Welcome to the Décima Lab!

We are kicking off our website with a blog following our voyage at sea aboard the RV Revelle during the CCE-LTER process cruise from July 10th to August 16th. The CCE, or California Current Ecosystem is a long-term ecological research (LTER) site that was developed to explore intriguing questions produced from the decades of measurements taken in the region of the ocean off the coast of California. Every other year a group of scientists gears up for a new voyage with hopes of shedding light on an unexplored question.

The overarching goal of the CCE program is to understand how our local ecosystem transitions between distinct ecological states: why do we see the organisms we do? This year the group plans to map out the physical, biological and chemical structure of a filament-a tendril of colder, nutrient-rich water shooting offshore.

The CCE program includes an interdisciplinary cast of chemists, biologists, physicists, and folks from many backgrounds from undergraduates, to volunteers, to veteran scientists. The Décima Lab will be conducting zooplankton research and deploying an arsenal of nets and instruments to collect data about these key links in the food web.

A beautiful yet challenging aspect of oceanography that we face every time we set sail is that we never know what we’ll find once out on the water. This paradox of attempting to conduct experiments and gain clarity in a dynamic, chaotic environment is one of the many reasons we oceanographers continue to dive deeper.

We hope you enjoy following along with our journey!

To follow the graduate-student-run blog for CCE:
https://cce.lternet.edu/blogs/201908/https://cce.lternet.edu/blogs/201908/

For more information on the CCE-LTER Program
https://cce.lternet.edu/https://cce.lternet.edu/