In April 2025, within the RSF competition “Research by world-class scientific laboratories within the framework of the priorities of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation”, our laboratory received a four-year grant. The topic of the supported project is Tropical and subtropical plankton of the World Ocean from the surface to the depths: biodiversity, stocks and relationship with climatic processes.

The methodological basis of the project is a qualitative expansion of the oceanic zooplankton database, both in space and in time, and, as a result, new statistically grounded findings. Plankton collection will be organised with the involvement of the tourism industry. Remote methods will provide additional information on various environmental factors and their seasonal dynamics: chlorophyll concentration at the surface (satellite) and in the water column (BGC-Argo float fleet), and hydrophysical and hydrochemical parameters (climatological data).

For the temporal expansion, the unique plankton collection of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, gathered since the early 1950s in all the oceans of our planet, will be processed. On the basis of the existing and new material, unique studies will be carried out at the scale of the entire tropical–subtropical zone of the World Ocean:
(1) Models of the dependence of the biomass of various zooplankton groups on environmental factors at different depths will be built and verified, together with maps of their stocks.
(2) Models of the dependence of zooplankton biodiversity indices at different depths will be built and verified, together with maps of their distribution.
(3) The stocks and biodiversity of oceanic plankton in the tropical and subtropical zones of the World Ocean will be estimated.
(4) Long-term trends in zooplankton biomass and biodiversity over the last 70 years, and the regional features of these trends, will be identified.
(5) The contribution of zooplankton to the functioning of the biological carbon pump will be quantified.
As a result, a large-scale study will be carried out of important aspects of the ecology of plankton in the tropical and subtropical zones of the World Ocean and its role in climatic processes.