NOAA Research – “Online dashboard makes it easy to see how chemical changes differ in various location. Researchers from NOAA have produced a new online dashboard on the National Marine Ecosystem Status website that shows how ocean acidification is impacting eleven different marine ecosystems in the U.S. These graphs, charts and mapped products, which were also described in a recent paper for Nature Scientific Data, provide a resource to fisheries and natural resource managers and deliver simple snapshots of ecosystem status with respect to ocean acidification. Ocean acidification occurs because our ocean is absorbing an increased amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂ ) from the atmosphere. Since the Industrial Revolution, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by almost 50 percent due to human activities like the burning of fossil fuels and land use change. The ocean absorbs about 25 percent of the CO₂ released to the atmosphere causing a fundamental change in the chemistry of the ocean. While the ocean isn’t acidic, the chemical change is increasing the ocean’s acidity enough to impact some marine life and the people who depend on healthy ecosystems. Ocean acidification can make it difficult for creatures such as oysters and clams to build and maintain shells, made up of calcium carbonate. Acidification also affects other species vital to the marine ecosystem, including reef-building corals and some plankton eaten by fish and whales. The new ocean acidification dashboard shows trends in calcium carbonate saturation state, a measure of the concentration of these mineral building blocks for shells and skeletons.”