Friends and colleagues:
We write to announce a session at the 2012 Ocean Sciences meeting in Salt Lake City, “Linking Biogeochemical Processes to Estuarine Physical Dynamics” (Session 100). Many of you are involved in exciting cross-disciplinary estuarine research that we would like to highlight in this session. There are no designated invited talks in the scientific program, so we are contacting scientists whose interests broadly fit the session theme. Please consider submitting an abstract (7 October deadline), and if you know of others not listed above encourage them to do the same.

http://www.sgmeet.com/osm2012/

Hope to see you in Salt Lake City!

Chris Sommerfield
University of Delaware
cs@udel.edu

Liz Canuel
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
ecanuel@vims.edu

Bob Chant
Rutgers University
chant@marine.rutgers.edu

Liz Sikes
Rutgers University
sikes@marine.rutgers.edu

 

100: LINKING BIOGEOCHEMICAL PROCESSES TO ESTUARINE PHYSICAL DYNAMICS
Physically mediated biogeochemical processes in estuaries play a central role in the fate of dissolved and particulate matter in the coastal ocean. Knowledge of cycling phenomena within estuarine basins is a critical component of terrestrial and ocean material budgets and has direct relevance to coastal and marine ecosystems. For example, understanding the composition, fluxes, and residence times of organic carbon is important for predicting oceanic responses to changes in past and future concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, linking biogeochemical and physical dynamics is fraught with observational challenges. Indeed, with time-dependent spatial gradients in water properties and transport mechanisms, estuaries are paradoxically regions of both of rapid dispersion and trapping. Elucidating physical-biogeochemical connections thus requires observational approaches capable of identifying material sources, transport pathways, and process time scales. This may involve coordinated studies of fluid flow, radionuclide tracers, stable isotope proxies, and biomarkers, in conjunction with integrative conceptual or numerical modeling. We invite contributions that seek to link estuarine biogeochemical processes to physical dynamics on the full range of time scales. Possible topics include land-to-estuary routing of particulate organic and mineral matter, primary production, larval transport, nutrient cycling, and organic carbon dynamics.