Education and public outreach

Teaching

The ECOMAP team includes two associate professors (Nathalie Simon and Christophe Six) who are involved in several degrees at Sorbonne University. A large part of their teaching activities is included in the new Master ‘Marine Sciences’ affiliated to the International educational program IMBRSea, a joint Master organized by nine leading European universities in the field of marine sciences. Besides the above programs, ECOMAP members are also involved in international courses organized in Roscoff (Advanced Phytoplankton Course, Marine Environmental and Ecological Genomics) and in Chile (ECODIM, Ecology and Diversity of Marine Microbes) and Asia (ASIAME, Workshop in Aquatic Microbial Ecology).

Citizen science

We actively participated to the creation of Phenomer, a monitoring program of marine water discolorations caused by phytoplankton blooms. Beyond communication and outreach objectives, this project based on citizen alerts extended the area of monitored coastal waters in Brittany (France) and yielded scientifically valuable data on harmful algal blooms. The ECOMAP team will strongly support this project, in close association with IFREMER.

In order to sample plankton from the world surface ocean across large spatio-temporal scales, we develop Plankton Planet/P2, the first citizen oceanographic program based on mass sequencing of DNA barcodes from plankton communities collected by citizen sailors.

Scientific mediation

As part of the P2 project, we develop of user-friendly imaging systems for citizen sailors and kids on one hand, and 3D-microscopy inspired pieces of plankton arts (3D models, augmented to virtual reality) on the other hand. Finally, the very successful initiative Planktomania uses new technologies such as augmented and virtual reality to bring plankton contribution to global ecology and more generally ocean related issues towards kids and broad public.