Observational carbon and nitrogen zooplankton stable isotope and environmental data in the North Atlantic Ocean from 2009-2018

Calanus (copepod) sampled by the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey (https://www.cprsurvey.org/) in the North Atlantic from 2009-2018 were analysed for stable carbon (d13C) and nitrogen (d15N) isotopes. The stable isotope analysis was done by the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) as part of National Environmental Isotope Facility (NEIF). Samples were loaded into an Elementar (Hanau, Germany) Pyrocube elemental analyser, which converted carbon and nitrogen in the samples to carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2) gases. δ13C and δ15N of evolved gases were measured on a Thermo-Fisher-Scientific (Bremen, Germany) Delta XP Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer. The system was calibrated using laboratory standards and then independently checked for accuracy using USGS 40 glutamic acid reference material (Qi et al., 2003; Coplen et al., 2006). Measurement precision was assessed by running replicates of laboratory standards and resulted in a standard deviation (SD) consistently < 0.1‰ and 0.2‰ for δ13C and δ15N, respectively.This observational dataset was used together with environmental variables (sea surface temperature, mixed layer depth, chlorophyll a, wind speed) to develop Bayesian spatial models and to produce yearly and seasonal isoscapes (spatial modelling of stable isotope ratio) for 1998-2020 (Espinasse 2022).