IRFP: Physical Regulation of Long-Term Ecosystem Variability in the North Atlantic

Barton Andrew D, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-month research fellowship by Dr. Andrew D. Barton to work collaboratively with Professors Richard Williams and Jonathan Sharples at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K., and Professor Susan Lozier at Duke University, Durham, NC, U.S.A. The structure of marine phytoplankton communities mediates the export of carbon and other minerals from the ocean surface to depth and the transfer of organic matter and energy through the food web. Climate variability is thought to impact the structure of marine phytoplankton communities by setting the physical and chemical environments in which phytoplankton and their predators reside. These ecological changes, in turn, feed back upon global biogeochemical cycles, the climate system, and marine ecosystems. However, the pathways by which climate variability regulates marine phytoplankton communities are not well understood. This research will quantify the linkages between the abundances of ~100 phytoplankton species and the observed, interannual to decadal variability in physical oceanographic processes that determine the ambient light and macronutrient supply supporting phytoplankton growth in the North Atlantic. In this effort, phytoplankton abundance observations from the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey, an unparalleled record of ecological variability in the North Atlantic over the last half-century, will be used. The goals of this analysis are to: a) evaluate key physical mechanisms by which climate impacts phytoplankton communities and b) examine how species with different functional traits respond to that forcing. To further assess the physical mechanisms identified by this analysis, simulations will be conducted with a combined circulation, biogeochemical, and phytoplankton community model of the North Atlantic for 1958-2010. By understanding the dynamic links between phytoplankton communities and climate in the observational record, this work has the potential to shed light on how marine ecosystems respond to climate variability and change. This research will build strong international collaboration between the Principal Investigator and complementary research groups at the University of Liverpool (Professors Williams and Sharples) and Duke University (Professor Lozier). We are aided in our efforts by ongoing intellectual collaboration with the research groups of Dr. Mick Follows (MIT) and Professor Zoe Finkel (Mt. Allison University).