NMBAQC

Phytoplankton

Scheme Administrator: Joe Silke, Marine Institute

The Marine Institute, Galway, Ireland, has conducted a Phytoplankton Enumeration and Identification Ring Test, under the auspices of the NMBAQC and BEQUALM annually since 2005. The purpose of this exercise is to compare the performance of laboratories engaged in national official/non-official phytoplankton monitoring programmes and other labs working in the area of phytoplankton in the European North Atlantic area (see the BEQUALM website). Most of the participating laboratories come from the UK and Ireland, however in recent years laboratories from Spain, Holland and Germany have also joined the scheme.

The Marine Institute is accredited to ISO 17025 for Toxic Marine phytoplankton identification and enumeration since 2004, and recognises that regular Quality Control assessments are crucial to ensure a high quality output of Phytoplankton data.

Phytoplankton Intercomparison Exercise 2010

Registration is now open for the Phytoplankton intercomparison exercise 2010. In order to register and make your payment please go to the BEQUALM website and follow the online instructions.  Close of registration is on 26th of February 2010.

This exercise will be broken down into two main areas and each participant will be asked to return results for each:

Identification - in the form of a "Taxonomic Quiz", whereby analysts will identify phytoplankton from images and will have to answer relevant taxonomical questions.

This year the identification exercise is an updated version of the 2008 exercise and it is designed to test those analysts who have not taken part in this exercise before. Those analysts who have participated in the last 2 years do not have to complete this part of the exercise for 2010.

Enumeration- a number of seawater samples spiked with phytoplankton cultured material will be sent to each laboratory.  The number of samples will be 6 samples per analyst. This year the samples are spiked with one species and our interest is on the cell counts more than the identification of the one species. This should reduce the sample time greatly compare to last year.

Also, this year for the first time we will be sending a wild sample to be analysed as this was one of the recommendations coming out of last years' workshop. This sample will not be compulsory for labs to do. Those labs that are interested in taking on this extra sample on top of the 6 samples will have to request this. This sample will be a concentrated, homogenised and lugol's preserved wild sample and a total phytoplankton cell count will be carried out, that is all species whether toxic or not to the highest taxonomic level possible.

There will be more information on the test sent to participants once they have registered.  If you have any questions about the exercise or registration, please don't hesitate to contact Rafael Salas for anything regarding the test, samples and so on or Tom Fisherin CTL CEFAS for anything related to exercise registration.