The ocean helps moderate climate change thanks to its considerable capacity to store CO2, through the combined actions of ocean physics, chemistry, and biology. This storage capacity limits the amount of human-released CO2 remaining in the atmosphere. As CO2 reacts with seawater, it generates dramatic changes in carbonate chemistry, including decreases in pH and carbonate ions and an increase in bicarbonate ions. The consequences of this overall process, known as "ocean acidification", are raising concerns for the biological, ecological, and biogeochemical health of the world's oceans, as well as for the potential societal implications. This research level text is the first to synthesize the very latest understanding of the consequences of ocean acidification, with the intention of informing both future research agendas and marine management policy. A prestigious list of authors has been assembled, among them the coordinators of major national and international projects on ocean
acidification.

About the Author:
Jean-Pierre Gattuso is CNRS Research Professor at the Laboratoire d'Oceanographie de Villefranche, CNRS and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6. His main research activity relates to the cycling of carbon and carbonate in coastal ecosystems. More recently, he focused on the response of marine organisms and ecosystems to ocean acidification and published his first paper on this topic in 1998. He is the Scientific Coordinator of the FP7 large-scale integrated project EPOCA (European Project on Ocean Acidification). Jean-Pierre Gattuso is co-editor of the "Guide to Best Practices in Ocean Acidification Research and Data Reporting" published by the European Publications Office in 2010. He is also the Founding President of the Biogeosciences Division of the European Geosciences Union (2001-2005) and the Founding editor-in-chief of the journal Biogeosciences (2004-2009). More information is available at: http: //www.obs-vlfr.fr/ gattuso and http: //epoca-project.eu.

Lina Hansson has a Master of Science in Biotechnology Engineering and is the project manager of EPOCA - the European Project on Ocean Acidification. She co-edited the "Guide to Best Practices in Ocean Acidification Research and Data Reporting", a guidance document for the ocean acidification research community covering seawater carbonate chemistry, experimental design of perturbation experiments, measurements of CO2-sensitive processes and data reporting and usage. The guide was published in 2010 and is freely available from http: //www.epoca-project.eu/index.php/Home/Guide-to-OA-Research/. Lina Hansson is the co-author of several articles on the EPOCA project in the newsletters of IMBER, SOLAS, LOICZ and The Eggs and in a special issue of Oceanography magazine on ocean acidification published in 2009.