Bio-GO-SHIP wins the 2024 NOPP Excellence in Partnering Award

On May 13, 2025, the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) announced that our project, “Piloting Biological Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (Bio-GO-SHIP) on US cruises: Towards a global analysis of large-scale changes to ocean plankton systems,” won the 2024 Excellence in Partnering Award. NOPP gives the award each year to the project that best exemplifies its goal of building a successful network of partnerships to advance the ocean sciences. The team accepted the award at a ceremony during the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Glasgow on February 25, 2026.

For more than 30 years, GO-SHIP has tracked trends in ocean heat, ventilation, circulation, oxygen, and carbon uptake. Bio-GO-SHIP is the first systematic effort to add biological measurements, such as plankton abundance, function, and distribution, to these decadally repeated sections.

“Bio-GO-SHIP shows what’s possible when we combine advanced biological tools with decades of physical and chemical ocean observations,” said Principal Investigator Adam Martiny (UC Irvine).

During the pilot phase, the team sampled more than 400 stations on GO-SHIP sections in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. These measurements will help establish basin-wide patterns of plankton diversity, activity, and function, so that plankton can serve as “biosensors” of the ocean environment. Our bio-optical and pigment measurements also support satellite calibration and validation for NASA’s PACE mission.

The project has also trained 13 undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students at sea and in the lab. “Students are excited to both learn best practices for ocean sampling and to contribute to the critical mission of GO-SHIP,” said co-PI Luke Thompson (NGI and NOAA AOML).

The Bio-GO-SHIP team includes Adam Martiny (UC Irvine), Harriet Alexander (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), Jason Graff (Oregon State University), Nicole Poulton (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences), Luke Thompson (Northern Gulf Institute and NOAA AOML), and Sophie Clayton (National Oceanography Centre, UK). The project is funded by NOPP, NOAA GOMO, NSF, NASA, NOAA OER, and NOAA IOOS.

Read the full story from NOAA’s Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing program: GOMO-funded Bio-GO-SHIP wins the 2024 NOPP Excellence in Partnering Award.