Francesco Mattei, Michele Scardi

Phytoplankton primary production is a key oceanographic process. It has intimate relationships with the marine food webs dynamics, the global carbon cycle and the Earth’s climate. The study of phytoplankton production on a global scale relies on indirect approaches due to the difficulties associated with field campaigns. On the other hand, modelling approaches require in situ data for both calibration and validation. In fact, the need for more phytoplankton primary production data was highlighted several times during the last decades.
Most of the available primary production datasets are scattered in various repositories, reporting heterogeneous information and missing records. For these reasons we decided to retrieve field measurements of marine phytoplankton primary production from several sources and create a homogeneous and ready to use dataset. We handled missing data and added several variables related to primary production which were not present in the original datasets. Subsequently, we carried out a general analysis of the dataset in which we highlighted the relationships between the variables from a numerical and an ecological perspective.
Data paucity is one of the main issues hindering the comprehension of complex natural processes.
In this framework, we believe that an updated and improved global dataset, complemented by an analysis of its characteristics, can be of interest to anyone studying marine phytoplankton production and the processes related to it.