Angus Atkinson joined Plymouth Marine Laboratory in 2012 from his previous employment at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). He is interested in all aspects of marine ecology and biogeochemistry, but with main focal areas on plankton and krill species, and particularly in polar regions and in the northeast Atlantic. Topics of particular interest include plankton size structure (biomass spectra); Euphausia superba (Antarctic krill); copepods; feeding ecology and energy budgets; Antarctic, Arctic and north Atlantic food webs; iron cycling by zooplankton; climate warming responses including shifts in phenology, distributional range and body size; responses to climatic extremes and the roles of zooplankton in the biological carbon pump.

To achieve these research objectives, Angus has had a long-standing interest in generating long time series which give clues into how real-world zooplankton assemblages have already responded, over multiple decadal timescales, to rapid climate change. To do this he started work at BAS in the 1990s to compile old historical krill records into a central database now called KRILLBASE. Currently he is working increasingly on how plankton in the NE Atlantic are coping with climate change but continues Southern Ocean interests by expanding KRILLBASE and making these databases more easily accessible.