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The ecology of the biological carbon pump

Posted by mmaheigan

· Tuesday, October 15th, 2019

Plankton in the surface ocean convert CO₂ into organic biomass thereby fueling marine food webs. Part of this organic biomass sinks down into the deep ocean, where the surface-derived organic carbon, or respired CO₂, is locked in for decades to millennia. Without the biological carbon pump, atmospheric CO₂ would be ~200 ppm higher than it is today. We know that ecological processes in the surface ocean plankton communities have a paramount importance on the efficiency of the biological carbon pump. Unfortunately, however, the mechanisms how ecology determines sinking fluxes are poorly understood.

A recent study in Global Biogeochemical Cycles used large-scale in situ mesocosms to explore how the ecological interplay within plankton communities affects the downward flux of organic material. Organic biomass tends to sink faster when produced by smaller organisms because the sinking material they generate forms dense aggregates. Conversely, larger organisms produce relatively porous particles that sink more slowly.

Figure: Flow chart illustrating how plankton community structure affects the properties of sinking organic particles and ultimately the strength and efficiency of the biological carbon pump. The thick arrows at the bottom indicate that flux attenuation depends on the properties of particulate matter formed in the surface ocean. For example, slow-sinking porous aggregates containing large amounts of easily degradable organic substances will decay faster (right side) than dense aggregates of more refractory organic matter (left side).

The key finding of this study was the unexpectedly large influence that plankton community composition has on the degradation rate of sinking organic biomass. In fact, degradation rates changed maximally 15-fold over the course of the study while sinking speed changed only 3-fold. Degradation rate of sinking material, measured in oxygen consumption assays, was quite variable and tended to be higher for more easily degradable fresh organic matter. The rate was lower during harmful algal blooms, which produce toxic substances that inhibit organisms that feed on aggregates thereby reducing degradation rates. These findings are an important step forward as they show that our predictive understanding of the biological carbon pump could be improved substantially when linking degradation rates of sinking material with ecological processes in surface ocean plankton communities.

Authors:
L. T. Bach (University of Tasmania)
P. Stange, J. Taucher, E. P. Achterberg, M. Esposito, U. Riebesell (GEOMAR)
M. Algueró‐Muñiz (Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz)
H. Horn (NIOZ and Utrecht University)

Where the primary production goes determines whether you catch tuna or cod

Posted by mmaheigan

· Friday, September 6th, 2019

Fishes are incredibly diverse, fill various roles in their ecosystems, and are an important resource—economically, socially, and nutritionally. The relationship between primary productivity and fish catches is not straightforward; fisheries oceanographers and managers have long struggled to predict abundances and fully understand the controls of cross-ecosystem differences in fish abundances and assemblages. A recent study in Progress in Oceanography modeled the relationships between fish abundances and assemblages and ecosystem factors such as physical properties and plankton productivity.

The mechanistic model simulated feeding, growth, reproduction, and mortality of small pelagic forage fish, large pelagic fish, and demersal (bottom-dwelling) fish in the global ocean using plankton food web estimates and ocean conditions from a high-resolution earth system model of the 1990s. Modeled fish assemblages were more related to the separation of secondary production into pelagic zooplankton or benthic fauna secondary production than to primary productivity. Specifically, the ratio of pelagic to benthic production drove spatial differences in dominance by large pelagic fish or by demersal fish. Similarly, demersal fish abundance was highly sensitive to the efficiency of energy transfer from exported surface production to benthic fauna.

The model results offer a systematic understanding of how marine fish communities are structured by spatially varying environmental conditions. With global climate change, the expected decrease in exported primary production would lead to fewer demersal fish around the world. This model provides a framework for testing the effect of changing conditions on fish communities at a global scale, which can also help inform managers of potential impacts on economic, social, and nutritional resources worldwide.

Figure 1: (A) Sample food web with three fish types, two habitats, two prey categories, and feeding interactions (arrows). Dashed arrow denotes feeding only occurs in shelf regions with depth <200 m. (B) Fraction of large pelagic vs. demersal fishes (LP/(LP+D)) as a function of the ratio of zooplankton production lost to higher predation (Zoop) to detritus flux to the seafloor (Bent) averaged over large marine ecosystems. Solid line: predicted linear model response, dashed lines: standard error. (Lower panels) Circles=mean biomasses (g m^-2) and lines=fluxes of biomass (g m^-2 d^-1) through the pelagic (top 100m) and benthic components of the food webs at two test locations, (C) Peruvian Upwelling (PUP) ecosystem and (D) Eastern Bering Sea (EBS) shelf ecosystem. Circles and lines scale with the modeled biomasses and fluxes. Circle color key: Gray=net primary productivity (NPP); yellow=medium and large zooplankton; red=forage fish; blue=large pelagic fish; brown=benthos; green=demersal fish.

Authors:
Colleen M. Petrik (Princeton University, Texas A&M University)
Charles A. Stock (NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory)
Ken H. Andersen (Technical University of Denmark)
P. Daniël van Denderen (Technical University of Denmark)
James R. Watson (Oregon State University)

Can microzooplankton shape the depth distribution of phytoplankton?

Posted by mmaheigan

· Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019

Photosynthetic, single-celled phytoplankton form the base of many marine and lacustrine (lake) food webs. These microscopic algae typically occur in the sunlit surface layer, but in many ecosystems, there are also sub-surface peaks in phytoplankton and chlorophyll-a, their key photosynthetic pigment. Historically, scientists have explained deep chlorophyll maximum (DCM) formation by invoking “bottom-up” processes such as nutrient and light co-limitation, while less attention has been paid to “top-down” controls such as predation.

A recent study in Nature Communications challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that microzooplankton (top-down control) can cause the formation of DCMs by preferentially consuming phytoplankton near the surface. This can occur when microzooplankton exhibit light-dependent grazing—a known but not well-understood phenomenon in which prey consumption rates increase with increasing light intensity. By incorporating this phenomenon into mathematical models, the authors showed that this can create a “spatial refuge” for phytoplankton in deeper, darker parts of the water column, where there is enough sunlight to photosynthesize, but too little for efficient microzooplankton predation. Furthermore, when light-dependent grazing is incorporated into a global ocean biogeochemistry model (COBALT: Carbon, Ocean Biogeochemistry and Lower Trophics – planktonic ecosystem model), DCMs that are already present due to bottom-up controls deepen, improving agreement between model predictions, satellite data, and in situ observations.

Figure legend: Global comparison of annual mean deep chlorophyll maxima (DCM) depths (A) predicted by the unmodified COBALT model, (B) predicted by the COBALT model modified to include light-dependent microzooplankton grazing, and (C) estimated based on satellite data. Incorporating light-dependent grazing deepens the DCM, especially in oligotrophic gyres, and improves agreement with observational data.

These findings highlight the importance of higher trophic levels in regulating aquatic primary productivity. The model predictions suggest that not only can microzooplankton suppress primary production near the surface, but by shifting phytoplankton abundances deeper, they may increase carbon export via the biological pump. Future field tests of this hypothesis—i.e. detailed grazing measurements in stratified water columns with DCMs—can elucidate the extent to which light-dependent grazing shapes phytoplankton distribution in real biological systems.

Authors:
Holly Moeller (University of California Santa Barbara)
Charlotte Laufkötter (University of Bern and Princeton University)
Edward Sweeney (Sea Education Association and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History)
Matthew Johnson (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Ocean color offers early warning signal of climate change’s impact on marine phytoplankton

Posted by mmaheigan

· Monday, April 15th, 2019

Marine phytoplankton form the foundation of the marine food web and play a crucial role in the earth’s carbon cycle. Typically, satellite-derived Chlorophyll a (Chl a) is used to evaluate trends in phytoplankton. However, it may be many decades (or longer) before we see a statistically significant signature of climate change in Chl a due to its inherently large natural variability. In a recent study in Nature Communications, authors explored how other metrics, in particular the color of the ocean, may show earlier and stronger signals of climate change at the base of the marine food web.

Figure 1. Computer model results indicating the year in which the signature of climate change impact is larger than the natural variability for (a) Chl a, and (b) remotely sensed reflectance in the blue-green waveband. White areas indicate where there is not a statistically significant change by 2100, or for regions that are currently ice-covered.

In this study, the authors use a unique marine physical-biogeochemical and ecosystem model that also captures how light penetrates the ocean and is reflected upward. The model shows that over the course of the 21^st century, remote sensing reflectance (R_RS, the ratio of upwelling radiance to the downwelling irradiance at the ocean’s surface) in the blue-green portions of the light spectrum is likely to have an earlier, more spatially extensive climate change-driven signal than Chl a (Figure 1). This is because R_RS integrates not only changes to Chl a, but also alterations in other optically important water constituents. In particular, R_RS also captures changes in phytoplankton community structure, which strongly affects ocean optics and is likely to be altered over the 21^st century. Monitoring the response of marine phytoplankton to climate change is important for predicting changes at higher trophic levels, including commercial fisheries. Our study emphasizes the importance of 1) maintaining ocean color sensor compatibility and long-term stability, particularly in the blue-green wavebands; 2) maintaining long-term in situ time-series of plankton communities – e.g., the Continuous Plankton Recorder survey and repeat stations (e.g., HOT, BATS); and 3) reducing uncertainties in satellite-derived phytoplankton community structure estimates.

Authors:
Stephanie Dutkiewicz, Oliver Jahn (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Anna E. Hickman (University of Southampton)
Stephanie Henson (National Oceanography Centre Southampton)
Claudie Beaulieu (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Erwan Monier (University of California, Davis)

A half century perspective: Seasonal productivity and particulates in the Ross Sea

Posted by mmaheigan

· Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019

Studies of cruise observations in the Ross Sea are typically biased to a single or a few year(s), and long-term trends have predominantly come from satellites. Consequently, the in situ climatological patterns of nutrients and particulate matter have remained vague and unclear. What are the typical patterns of nutrients and particulate matter concentrations in the Ross Sea in spring and summer? How do these concentrations affect annual productivity estimates?

Patterns of nutrient and particulate matter in the Ross Sea can play a wide-ranging role in a productive region like the Ross Sea. Smith and Kaufman (2018) recently synthesized austral spring and summer (November to February) observations from 42 Ross Sea research cruises (1967-2016) to analyze broad biogeochemical patterns. The resulting climatologies revealed interesting seasonal patterns of nutrient uptake and particulate organic carbon (POC) to chlorophyll (chl) ratios (POC:chl). Temporal patterns in the nitrate and phosphate climatologies confirm the role of early spring haptophyte (Phaeocystis antarctica) growth, followed by limited nitrogen and phosphorus removal in summer. However, a notable increase in POC occurred later in summer that was largely independent of chlorophyll changes, resulting in a dramatic increase in POC:chl. A gradual decline in silicic acid concentrations throughout the summer, along with an increased occurrence of biogenic silica during this time suggest that diatoms may be responsible for this later POC spike. Revised estimates of primary productivity based on these observed climatological POC:chl ratios suggests that summer blooms may be a significant contributor to seasonal productivity, and that estimates of productivity based on satellite pigments underestimate annual production by at least 70% (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Bio-optical estimates of mean productivity using a constant POC:chl ratio (black dots and lines) and modified estimates of productivity using the monthly climatological POC:chl ratios (red dots and lines), in a) the Ross Sea polynya region and b) the western Ross Sea region.

By clarifying typical seasonal patterns of nutrient uptake and POC:chl, these climatologies underscore the biogeochemical importance of both spring haptophyte growth and previously underestimated summer diatom growth in the Ross Sea. Further investigation of the causes and consequences of elevated summer ratios is needed, as assessments of regional food webs and biogeochemical cycles depend on more accurate understanding of primary productivity patterns. Likewise, these results highlight the need for continued efforts to constrain satellite productivity estimates in the Ross Sea using in situ constituent ratios.

For other relevant work on seasonal biogeochemical patterns in the Ross Sea, please see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr2.2003.07.010. And for intra-seasonal estimates of particulate organic carbon to chlorophyll using gliders, please see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr.2014.06.011.

Authors:
Walker O. Smith Jr. (VIMS, College of William and Mary)
Daniel E. Kaufman (VIMS, College of William and Mary; now at Chesapeake Research Consortium)

New BioGEOTRACES data sets: Connecting pieces of the microbial biogeochemical puzzle

Posted by mmaheigan

· Wednesday, December 19th, 2018

Microorganisms play a central role in the transfer of matter and energy in the marine food web. Microbes depend on micronutrients (e.g. iron, cobalt, zinc, and a host of other trace metals) to catalyze key biogeochemical reactions, and their metabolisms, in turn, directly affect the cycling, speciation, and bioavailability of these compounds. One might therefore expect that marine microbial community structure and the functions encoded within their genomes might be related to trace metal availability in the ocean. The overall productivity of marine ecosystems—i.e. the amount of carbon fixed through photosynthesis—could in turn be influenced by trace metal concentrations.

For over a decade, the international GEOTRACES program has been mapping the distribution and speciation of trace metals across vast ocean regions. Given the important relationship between trace metals and the function of marine ecosystems, biological oceanographers collaborate with GEOTRACES scientists to simultaneously probe the biotic communities at some sampling sites, allowing these biological data to be interpreted in the context of detailed chemical and physical measurements.

Figure 1. Locations and depths of samples. (a) Global map of sample locations. Single cell genomes are represented by miniaturized stacked dot-plots (each dot represents one single cell genome), with organism group indicated by color, and cells categorized as “undetermined” if robust placement within known phylogenetic groups failed due to low assembly completeness/quality or missing close references. Larger points correspond to stations on associated GEOTRACES sections where metagenomes were also collected. (b) Depth distribution of metagenome samples along each of the four GEOTRACES sections. Transect distances are calculated relative to the first station sampled in the indicated orientation. For clarity, the depth distribution of samples collected below 250 m are not shown to scale (ranging from 281–5601 m). Adapted from Berube et al. (2018) Sci. Data 5:180154 and Biller et al. (2018) Sci. Data 5:180176.

Two recent papers published in Scientific Data describes two new, large-scale biological data sets that will facilitate studies aimed at understanding how microbes and metals relate to one another. Collected on four different sets of GEOTRACES cruises (Figure 1), these papers report the public availability of hundreds of single cell genomes and microbial community metagenomes from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The single cell genomes focus on the marine photosynthetic bacteria Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus and how they and other community members vary in different regions of the ocean. The metagenomic sequences provide snapshots of the entire microbial community found in each of these samples, yielding a broad overview of which microbes—and which genes, including those important for understanding nutrient cycling—are found in each sample. These two datasets are complementary and further enhanced by the wealth of chemical and physical data collected by GEOTRACES scientists on the same water samples. In particular, iron is of key interest, since it often limits primary productivity. These data sets can directly link iron availability with microbial community structure and gene content across ocean basins.

With these data, researchers can now ask questions such as how microbes have evolved in response to the availability or limitation of key nutrients and explore which organisms may be contributing to biogeochemical cycles in different parts of the global ocean. The extensive suite of chemical and physical measurements associated with these sequence data underscore their potential to reveal important relationships between trace metals and the microbial communities that drive biogeochemical cycles. These data sets also encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations and provide baseline information as society faces the challenges and uncertainties of a changing climate.

Authors:
Paul M. Berube (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Steven J. Biller (Massachusetts Institute of Technology; current affiliation: Wellesley College)
Sallie W. Chisholm (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Physics shed new light on microbial filter-feeding

Posted by mmaheigan

· Wednesday, September 26th, 2018

Microbial filter-feeders actively filter water for bacteria-sized prey, but hydrodynamic theory predicts that their filtration rate should be one order of magnitude lower than what they realize. What is missing in our knowledge and modeling of these key components of aquatic food webs?

In a recent study published in PNAS, Nielsen et al. (2017) used a combination of microscopy observations, particle tracking, and analytical and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to shed light on the physics of microbial filter-feeding. They found that analytical and computational fluid dynamic estimates agree that the observed filtration rate cannot be realized given the known morphology and flagellum kinematics. The estimates consistently fall one order of magnitude short of observed filtration rates. This led the authors to suggest that their study organism, the choanoflagellate Diaphanoeca grandis, has a so-called ‘flagellar vane’, a sheet-like extension of the flagellum seen in some members of the choanoflagellate sister group, the marine sponges. This structure would fundamentally change the physics of the filtration process, and the authors found that both the analytical and the computational estimates match observed filtration rates when such a structure is included.

Left: Choanoflagellate model morphology showing the protoplast (cell) in orange, the filter comprised of microvilli (black), the lorica and chimney (red) and the flagellum with vane (blue). Right: Experimentally observed near-cell flow field vs. flow field modelled using computational fluid dynamics including a flagellar vane. The filter cross-section is here shown in green. The modelled flow field provides a good match with the observed flow field. Without a flagellar vane, the model flow field is at least an order of magnitude weaker. This leads to the suggestion that a flagellar vane is needed to account for the observed flow field and clearance rate.

The new insights allow the authors to generalize about the trade-offs involved in microbial filtering, which is important to our understanding of the microbial loop in planktonic food webs. The results are of even wider interest since choanoflagellates are believed to be the evolutionary ancestors of all multicellular animals, many of which include cells that are fundamentally identical to choanoflagellates (e.g., the simple cuboidal epithelium cells of kidneys). Thus, microscale filtering not only happens in every single drop of seawater, it also happens inside most animals.

Learn more here.

Authors:
Lasse Tor Nielsen (National Institute of Aquatic Resources and Centre for Ocean Life, Technical University of Denmark)
Seyed Saeed Asadzadeh (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark)
Julia Dölger (Department of Physics and Centre for Ocean Life, Technical University of Denmark)
Jens H. Walther (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich, ETH Zentrum)
Thomas Kiørboe (National Institute of Aquatic Resources and Centre for Ocean Life, Technical University of Denmark)
Anders Andersen (Department of Physics and Centre for Ocean Life, Technical University of Denmark)

Updates and Plans for the First EXPORTS Field Campaign

Posted by mmaheigan

· Thursday, February 1st, 2018

Contacts: David Siegel (UCSB; EXPORTS Science Lead) & Ivona Cetinić (NASA GSFC/USRA; EXPORTS Project Scientist)

EXPORTS in a Nutshell

Ocean ecosystems constitute a significant fraction of the world’s primary production, fixing CO₂ and creating oxygen while playing critical roles in sequestering CO₂ from the atmosphere. An improved understanding of the cycling and fate of oceanic organic carbon will not only allow for better prediction of how these processes may change in the future, but it will help underpin the societal value of these ocean ecosystem services. The EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing (EXPORTS) field campaign aims to provide answers to these questions.

The goal of EXPORTS is to develop a predictive understanding of the export and fate of global ocean net primary production (NPP) and its implications for the Earth’s carbon cycle in present and future climates (oceanexports.org). To develop this quantitative understanding, EXPORTS will measure and model the export pathways that remove fixed organic carbon from the upper ocean and drive the attenuation of these vertical fluxes within the ocean interior. EXPORTS datasets will be used to develop and test numerical predictive and satellite-data diagnostic models of NPP fates and their carbon cycle impacts. EXPORTS builds on decades of NASA-funded research on developing and validating satellite data-driven models of regional to global NPP and hence, EXPORTS will contribute to NASA’s upcoming Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission.

A Brief History of EXPORTS

The NASA EXPORTS field campaign is the result of an initial open competition in 2012 by the NASA Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry (OBB) Program to identify scoping workshops for future field campaigns. This was followed by many years of committee-based planning, community vetting of science and implementation plans, and final peer review. The NASA EXPORTS Science and Implementation Plans were made publicly available by the NASA OBB program. In February 2016, the National Science Foundation held the Biology of the Biological Pump (BoBP) workshop aimed in part to leverage NASA’s planned investment in the EXPORTS field program. In August 2016, NASA announced it would support data mining and observational system simulation experiment (OSSE) projects to help with planning the NASA EXPORTS field campaign and five projects were funded under this pre-EXPORTS call.

In early 2017, NASA released a call for proposals for the EXPORTS field program and the competition for inclusion on the NASA EXPORTS Science Team and its leadership. The call also included the implementation approach for the EXPORTS field program, with two major cruises to collect in situ data, followed by a synthesis and analysis phase to be competed in the future. At the same time, NSF released a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) stating they would consider proposals that leveraged the NASA investment with objectives that supported the BoBP plan. From the NASA competition, 11 projects were selected for support (Table 1). Three NSF proposals have been recommended for support (at the time of this writing, the awarding of these grants is not yet official), bringing the count to a total of 41 PIs and co-PIs that are supported by NASA and NSF on EXPORTS/BoBP. This level of investment likely makes EXPORTS the largest coordinated U.S.-funded biogeochemical field program since the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) nearly 2 decades ago. Table 1 lists the funded projects, PI, and co-PIs, project titles, and links to two page descriptions for each project.

Any implementation of the EXPORTS field program must result in the quantification of the major export pathways that remove fixed organic carbon from the upper ocean and sequester it at depth. NASA is uniquely poised, given the global vantage point of space-based observations, to use Earth observing satellite data to meet this objective, while also understanding observational requirements for future advanced Earth Observing missions. Quantification of major carbon export pathways requires the simultaneous measurement of 1) sinking particle fluxes (and their composition), 2) the export of organic carbon to depth via vertically migrating zooplankton, and 3) the vertical transport of dissolved and suspended particulate organic carbon to depth, where it is remineralized by different microbial communities. To develop predictive links to satellite ocean color-retrievable parameters, the quantification of export pathways must be augmented by research programs focused on, but not limited to, the elucidation of plankton community structure, rates of NPP and grazing, and optical oceanography. Complicating this further is the stochastic nature of export flux determinations that necessitates a fully four-dimensional sampling design while maintaining a long-term perspective. This reasoning led to the Agency selection of projects listed in Table 1.

The planning of the EXPORTS field campaign is well underway. The first field deployment is planned to take place in the summer of 2018 in the Northeast Pacific, while the tentative second cruise will be in the North Atlantic Ocean in the spring of 2020. NASA has formed a project office staffed of Agency and EXPORTS PIs to direct EXPORTS’ progress. The EXPORTS Science Team, which comprises the funded PIs, is participating on near-weekly teleconferences, and co-chief scientists have been selected. An initial EXPORTS kickoff meeting was held in September 2017 in the Washington, DC area. There, the PIs organized themselves into working groups focused on creating short methodological descriptions for each measurement to be made. This documentation will be critical for the metadata, the project data management, and for ensuring legacy of the program through a set of NASA Technical Memoranda. This has also proven to be an excellent way to foster cross-project collaborations. A second PI meeting is scheduled for mid-February 2018, leveraging the upcoming Ocean Sciences Meeting.

EXPORTS First Field Deployment

The first EXPORTS field deployment will be to the Northeast Pacific Ocean in late summer 2018. Two ships, the R/V Roger Revelle and the R/V Sally Ride, will be deployed for 27 days of coordinated sampling around Station P (50°N 145°W), while EXPORTS’ autonomous component will ensure a longer-term presence. The choice of Station P as an anchor point for the field campaign was made based on results from the data mining and OSSE projects and the availability of a long-term data set for this site, as well as the many sampling partnerships afforded by ongoing programs. Canada’s Line P long-term hydrographic/biogeochemistry program has been running since 1949, and they currently conduct three annual transect cruises from British Columbia to Station P. Other useful partnerships include NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory’s (PMEL) air-sea interaction buoy and the NSF’s Ocean Observatories Initiative’s (OOI) global node at Station P.

Figure 1: Cartoon depicting many of the individual elements to be deployed during the 2018 EXPORTS sampling program in the North Pacific.

The EXPORTS 2018 field deployment will comprise four basic components (depicted in Figure 1 above). First, several autonomous vehicles will be deployed before the ship observations. An instrumented Lagrangian float will be deployed at depth and used to set the spatial center of the sampling program, while an instrumented Seaglider will be used to provide vertical and some horizontal spatial information around the Lagrangian float’s drift. In addition, and if approved by the OOI Facility Board, instrumented gliders deployed at the Station P OOI global node will be used to supplement the autonomous vehicle data streams.

Second, the R/V Roger Revelle will be the Process Ship, and will follow the Lagrangian float. The Process Ship will focus on rates (NPP, sinking particle fluxes, grazing, net community production, zooplankton respiration and fecal particle production, aggregate formation, etc.) and vertical information (microbial community structure and particle size spectra) in the water mass surrounding the float. Rate measurements will be made using water sampled with a trace metal-clean rosette system, and sinking particle fluxes from neutrally buoyant sediment traps (NBSTs) and sediment trap array. In particular, microbial community structure will be measured using a variety of techniques, including high-throughput microscopic imaging systems, meta-community genomic sequencing, isolation and experimentation on individual marine snow aggregates, and gel trap-collected sinking particles. The Process Ship will also conduct a complete optical oceanographic sampling program ensuring links to remotely sensed parameters. Drs. Deborah Steinberg (VIMS) and Jason Graff (OSU) have volunteered to be co-chief scientists for the R/V Revelle.

Third, the R/V Sally Ride will be the Survey Ship making spatial patterns about the Process Ship on scales from roughly 1 km to nearly 100 km. The focus of the Survey Ship will be collecting horizontal spatial information on particle export (²³⁴Th disequilibrium), net community production (O₂/Ar), organic carbon stocks, phytoplankton composition, and inherent and apparent optical properties. The Survey Ship will also deploy a suite of instrumentation to characterize the particle size spectrum from 20 nm to nearly a cm. It will also be responsible for validating the calibration of the autonomous vehicles’ bio-optical instrumentation and the development of the biogeochemical proxies. Norm Nelson (UCSB) and Mary Jane Perry (self-affiliated) have agreed to be the co-chief scientists on the R/V Sally Ride.

Last, EXPORTS needs a long-term sampling presence to tie the ship-based observations to climatically relevant time and space scales. The Lagrangian float and Seaglider will sample for ~6 months, bracketing EXPORTS’ intensive ship observations, and thus providing some long-term perspectives to the ship sampling. Partnering programs like Line P and the OOI Global Node will allow for some additional in situ sampling opportunities and broader temporal context. Further, the PMEL mooring and a profiling float project recommended for funding by NSF will extend the long-term biogeochemical observations.

The integration of the observations will generate a data set that will not only be invaluable for building new algorithms for retrievals of new and refined data products from NASA’s current fleet of Earth Observing Satellites, but also will be critical in the development of new sets of requirements for future satellite observations of our Earth system. As described in the EXPORTS Implementation Plan, the likelihood of the EXPORTS achieving its predictive goals will increase as the number and variety of observations available to develop and test novel algorithms increases. Hence, the EXPORTS program is particularly motivated to collaborate with international partners who would be interested to share their data sets to address these important issues.

An Amazing Opportunity for Ocean Science

EXPORTS is the first large-scale, coordinated opportunity aimed at understanding the ocean’s biological pump since the JGOFS program. Hence, the EXPORTS team is planning to create a long-term legacy for these one-of-a-kind datasets. NASA is supporting a full-time data manager to make sure that all of the information collected is easily accessible to all; as per NASA policies, all data will be freely available. Efforts are being made to ensure the intercalibration and interoperability of measurements made across different platforms, thus ensuring continuity of the datasets. EXPORTS also plans to over-collect whole water, filtered particulate, and trap-collected samples that can be used for many purposes, both now by collaborators, and in the future as analytical methodologies become more powerful.

The timing for EXPORTS could not be better. Our understanding of the biological pump and in particular, the fate of ocean NPP has rapidly advanced over the past decade. We now know that the biological pump is four-dimensional, which complicates our observational approaches, and that food web and aggregate dynamics, microbial community composition and function, individual organism physiology and behavior, and submesoscale turbulent transport are all components that need to be quantified. Further, our observing tools and capabilities have witnessed giant leaps over just the past couple of years. Novel imaging instruments can now measure particle and aggregate size distributions and identify and quantify plankton abundances. Genomic approaches enable the characterization of plankton communities and their physiology. Novel hyperspectral optical measurements of ocean reflectance as well as component inherent optical properties provide strong links to present and future satellite ocean color missions. High-resolution numerical models now enable the elucidation of submesoscale (100s m to ~10 km) processes that include food webs and biogeochemistry, while autonomous vehicles provide persistent and spatially distributed observations that complement the shipboard sampling. It seems the time for EXPORTS is now.

Click for PDF of article and table

Table 1: EXPORTS Science Team

Lead PI	Co-PIs	Project Title
Michael Behrenfeld (OSU) – NASA	Emmanuel Boss (UMaine), Jason Graff (OSU), Lionel Guidi (LOV), Kim Halsey (OSU), & Lee Karp-Boss (UMaine)	First Step – Linking Remotely-Detectable Optical Signals, Photic Layer Plankton Properties, and Export Flux
Ken Buesseler (WHOI) – NASA	Claudia Benitez-Nelson (USC) & Laure Resplandy (Princeton)	Elucidating Spatial and Temporal Variability in the Export and Attenuation of Ocean Primary Production using Thorium-234
Craig Carlson (UCSB) – NASA	Dennis Hansell (RSMAS)	Evaluating the Controls of Dissolved Organic Matter Accumulation, its Availability to Bacterioplankton, its Subsequent Diagenetic Alteration and Contribution to Export Flux
Meg Estapa (Skidmore) -NASA	Ken Buesseler (WHOI), Colleen Durkin (MLML) & Melissa Omand (URI)	Linking Sinking Particle Chemistry and Biology with Changes in the Magnitude and Efficiency of Carbon Export into the Deep Ocean
Craig Lee (UW) – NASA	Eric D’Asaro (UW), David Nicholson (WHOI), Melissa Omand (URI), Mary Jane Perry (self-affiliated) & Andrew Thompson (CalTech)	Autonomous Investigation of Export Pathways from Hours to Seasons
Adrian Marchetti (UNC) – NASA	Nicolas Cassar (Duke) & Scott Gifford (UNC)	Quantifying the Carbon Export Potential of the Marine Microbial Community: Coupling of Biogenic Rates and Fluxes with Genomics at the Ocean Surface
Susanne Menden-Deuer (URI) – NASA	Tatiana Rynearson (URI)	Quantifying Plankton Predation Rates, and Effects on Primary Production, Phytoplankton Community Composition, Size Spectra and Potential for Export
Collin Roesler (Bowdoin) – NASA	Heidi Sosik (WHOI)	Phytoplankton community structure, carbon stock, carbon export and carbon flux: What role do diatoms play in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans?
David Siegel (UCSB) – NASA	Adrian Burd (UGA), Andrew McDonnell (UAF), Norm Nelson (UCSB) & Uta Passow (UCSB)	Synthesizing Optically and Carbon Export-Relevant Particle Size Distributions for the EXPORTS Field Campaign
Deborah Steinberg (VIMS) – NASA	Amy Maas (BIOS)	Zooplankton-Mediated Export Pathways: Quantifying Fecal Pellet Export and Active Transport by Diel and Ontogenetic Vertical Migration in the North Pacific and Atlantic Oceans
Xiaodong Zhang (UND) – NASA	Deric Gray (NRL), Lionel Guidi (LOV) & Yannick Huot (Sherbrooke)	Optically Resolving Size and Composition Distributions of Particles in the Dissolved-Particulate Continuum from 20 nm to 20 mm to Improve the Estimate of Carbon Flux
Bethany Jenkins (URI) – NSF^*	Mark Brzezinski (UCSB) & Kristen Buck (USF)	Collaborative Research: Diatoms, Food Webs and Carbon Export – Leveraging NASA EXPORTS to Test the Role of Diatom Physiology in the Biological Carbon Pump
Ben Van Mooy (WHOI) -NSF^*		Environmental Lipidomics of Suspended and Sinking Particles in the Upper Ocean
Andrea Fassbender (MBARI) – NSF^*		Constraining Upper-Ocean Carbon Export with Biogeochemical Profiling Floats

^*Project recommended for funding by NSF, but not officially funded as of this publication.

Phytoplankton increase projected for the Ross Sea in response to climate change

Posted by mmaheigan

· Thursday, October 26th, 2017

How will phytoplankton respond to climate changes over the next century in the Ross Sea, the most productive coastal waters of Antarctica? Model projections of physical conditions suggest substantial environmental changes in this region, but associated impacts on Ross Sea biology, specifically phytoplankton, remain unclear.

In a recent study, Kaufman et al (2017) generated and analyzed model scenarios for the mid- and late-21^st century using a combination of a biogeochemical model, hydrodynamic simulations forced by a global climate projection, and new data from autonomous gliders. These scenarios indicate increases in the production of phytoplankton in the Ross Sea and increases in the downward flux of carbon in response to environmental changes over the next century. Modeled responses of the different phytoplankton groups to shoaling mixed layer depths shift the biomass composition more towards diatoms by the mid 21^st century. While diatom biomass remains relatively constant in the second half of the 21^st century, the haptophyte Phaeocystis antarctica biomass increases as a result of earlier seasonal sea ice melt, allowing earlier availability of low light, in which P. antarctica thrive.

Modeled climate scenarios for the 21st century project phytoplankton composition changes and increases in primary production and carbon export flux, primarily as a result of shoaling mixed layer depths and earlier available low light.

The projected responses of phytoplankton composition, production, and carbon export to climate-related changes can have broad impacts on food web functioning and nutrient cycling, with wide-ranging potential effects as local deep waters are transported out from the Ross Sea continental shelf. Future changes to this ecosystem have taken on a new relevance as the Ross Sea became home this year to the world’s largest Marine Protected Area, designed to protect critical habitat for highly valued species that rely on the Ross Sea food web. Continued coordination between modeling and autonomous observing efforts is needed to provide vital data for global ocean assessments and to improve our understanding of ecosystem dynamics and climate change impacts in this sensitive and important region.

For other relevant work on observing phytoplankton characteristics in the Ross Sea using gliders, please see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr.2014.06.011.

And for assimilation of bio-optical glider data in the Ross Sea please see: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2017-258.

Authors:
Daniel E. Kaufman (VIMS, College of William and Mary)
Marjorie A. M. Friedrichs (VIMS, College of William and Mary)
Walker O. Smith Jr. (VIMS, College of William and Mary)
Eileen E. Hofmann (CCPO, Old Dominion University)
Michael S. Dinniman (CCPO, Old Dominion University)
John C. P. Hemmings (Wessex Environmental Associates; now at the UK Met Office)

Phytoplankton can actively diversify their migration strategy in response to turbulent cues

Posted by mmaheigan

· Thursday, August 17th, 2017

Turbulence is known to be a primary determinant of plankton fitness and succession. However, open questions remain about whether phytoplankton can actively respond to turbulence and, if so, how rapidly they can adapt to it. Recent experiments have revealed that phytoplankton can behaviorally respond to turbulent cues with a rapid change in shape, and this response occurs over a few minutes. This challenges a fundamental paradigm in oceanography that phytoplankton are passively at the mercy of turbulence.

Phytoplankton are photosynthetic microorganisms that form the base of most aquatic food webs, impact global biogeochemical cycles, and produce half of the world’s oxygen. Many species of phytoplankton are motile and migrate in response to gravity and light levels: Upward toward light during the day to photosynthesize and downward at night toward higher nutrient concentrations. Disruption of this diurnal migratory strategy is an important contributor to the succession between motile and non-motile species when conditions become more turbulent. However, this classical view neglects the possibility that motile species can actively respond in an effort to avoid layers of strong turbulence. A recent study by Sengupta, Carrara and Stocker, published in Nature has shown that some raphidophyte and dinoflagellate phytoplankton can actively diversify their migratory strategy in response to hydrodynamic cues characteristic of overturning by the smallest turbulent eddies in the ocean. Laboratory experiments in which cells experienced repeated overturning with timescales and statistics representative of ocean turbulence revealed that over timescales as short as ten minutes, an upward-swimming population split into two subpopulations, one swimming upward and one swimming downward. Quantitative morphological analysis of the harmful algal bloom-forming raphidophyte Heterosigma akashiwo revealed that this behavior was accompanied by a change in cell shape, wherein the cells that changed their swimming direction did so by going from an asymmetric pear shape to a more symmetric egg shape. A model of cell mechanics showed that the magnitude of this shift was minute, yet sufficient to invert the cells’ preferential swimming direction. The results highlight the advanced level of control that phytoplankton have on their migratory behavior.

Understanding how fluctuations in the oceans’ turbulence landscape impacts phytoplankton is of fundamental importance, especially for predicting species succession and community structure given projected climate-driven changes in temperature, winds, and upper ocean structure.

An upward-swimming phytoplankton population splits into upward- and downward-swimming sub-populations when exposed to turbulent eddies, due to a subtle change in cell shape. Illustration by: A. Sengupta, G. Gorick, F. Carrara and R. Stocker

This work was co-funded by a Human Frontier Science Program Cross Disciplinary Fellowship (LT000993/2014-C to A.S.), a Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship (to F.C.), and a Gordon and Betty Moore Marine Microbial Initiative Investigator Award (GBMF 3783 to R.S.)

Funding for the Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry Project Office is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The OCB Project Office is housed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Archive for food webs – Page 2

EXPORTS in a Nutshell

A Brief History of EXPORTS

EXPORTS First Field Deployment

An Amazing Opportunity for Ocean Science

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