This is from Desiree, who's having trouble with wiki permissions. Here is a cut-and-paste of her summary she sent me:
Not only is photoplankton close to the foundation for life and at the base of the
food chain for marine ecosystems, but it also produces half of the oxygen in
our atmosphere. They are good indicators for studying the effects of global
warming.
From my sources I have found data about the quantity of photoplankton in the
Northern Atlantic ocean and how the quantity is effected by climate change.
Alterations in ocean temperature cause photoplankton to decrease their
chlorophyll biomass, decrease their occurrance, cause a change in their season
duration, and results in an abundance of harmful algae blooms that struggle to
fill in the niche that is usually filled by the photoplankton.
In short, the location and quantity of photoplankton effects the location and
quantity of zooplankton and the entire marine ecosystem since they are the
producers in that food web.
Some suggestions to solving this problem would be to grow photoplankton
and use those artificial populations to feed in the wild but the locations of release
would have to be carefully determined.