Biocomplexity: Multiscale Models of Ecological and Geochemical Interactions in Marine Sedimentary Environments

University Of Maryland Center For Environmental Sciences, Cambridge MD

Investigators

Abstract

The seafloor contains diverse assemblages of organisms, woven into complex ecological systems where their activities, distributions and biological interactions are intricately linked to the physical and chemical character of the sedimentary environment. It is also an active site of elemental cycling, and a critical long?term sink in the global cycles of major constituents, including carbon, nitrogen and sulfur. Thus, the interplay between organisms and sediment properties can strongly influence the geological/geochemical record, clouding the understanding of past climate and paleoceanography, and obscuring the ability to determine current rates of elemental cycling and burial. There is considerable information about specific processes within sedimentary environments but little is known of how to integrate them. Such integration is critical to understanding the role of sediments in global environmental processes, and the selective pressures affecting population structure, community ecology and reproductive success of resident organisms. To understand and predict the interactions between the biology, chemistry and physics of sediments, and their impacts on populations, communities, and biogeochemical processes, models must be developed to permit the basic geochemical and geophysical processes to respond to the activities of organisms, and vice versa. A series of workshops will be held to bring together ecologists and ecological modelers, physiologists and microbial biologists, physical and geochemical modelers with numerical modeling expertise, biogeochemists and applied mathematicians to attack this numerically intensive and difficult problem. The goals are as follows: to discuss scales of interactions, feedback loops, nonlinear processes and emergent properties, and how they might be successfully included in existing modeling approaches; to broaden models to achieve integration over multiple spatial and temporal scales; to discuss novel mathematical approaches or combinations of models; to summarize findings in a commentary piece, and finally to discuss 'next steps'. The research topic will most likely lend itself to one or more research proposals, or perhaps, a new initiative in coastal sedimentary processes.