History of the CPR
Sir Alister Hardy started his career as a fishery biologist in
Lowestoft, England. In 1925 he embarked on a two-year voyage to the
Antarctic on the ship 'Discovery'. He designed the prototype CPR
(Mark I) specifically for the expedition.
| After his return in 1927, Hardy designed a smaller version of the CPR (Mark II) for use on merchant ships. This model is essentially the same as that used routinely today. In September 1931, the SS Albatross towed the first CPR and the survey was born. The CPR Survey was based in Hull until 1950, when it moved to Edinburgh under the administration of the Scottish Marine Biological Association (SMBA). In 1959 the first transatlantic route was towed from Reykjavik to Newfoundland. |  |
| In 1976, the whole survey relocated to the IMER Laboratory (later named the Plymouth Marine Laboratory or PML). From 1990 the survey has operated as an independent organisation and was formally established in 1990 as a registered foundation named after Sir Alister Hardy. SAHFOS moved to the Marine Biological Laboratory site at Citadel Hill in 1993. |
A 'Plankton Atlas of the North Atlantic and the North Sea' was
published in 1973 in the journal 'Bulletins of Marine Ecology' and
is regularly updated. Software to enable CPR data to be more freely
available in the form of the 'WinCPR' database was launched in 2005
and is available on this web site. WinCPR is a gridded database of
plankton abundance in the North Sea. The month by month data spans
50 years from 1948 to 1997. WinCPR contains interpolated statistics
for 112 planktonic organisms or indices (zooplankton and
phytoplankton) and provides a flexible interface for users to
access a subset of the data.
