Journal
LIMNOLOGY AND OCEANOGRAPHY
Volume 57, Issue 6, Pages 1877-1891Publisher
AMER SOC LIMNOLOGY OCEANOGRAPHY
DOI: 10.4319/lo.2012.57.6.1877
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP)
- National Science Foundation
- National Space and Aeronautic Administration
- National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
- Division Of Ocean Sciences
- Directorate For Geosciences [1029900] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present a model of diverse phytoplankton and zooplankton populations embedded in a global ocean circulation model. Physiological and ecological traits of the organisms are constrained by relationships with cell size. The model qualitatively reproduces global distributions of nutrients, biomass, and primary productivity, and captures the power-law relationship between cell size and numerical density, which has realistic slopes of between -1.3 and -0.8. We use the model to explore the global structure of marine ecosystems, highlighting the importance of both nutrient and grazer controls. The model suggests that zooplankton : phytoplankton (Z : P) biomass ratios may vary from an order of 0.1 in the oligotrophic gyres to an order of 10 in upwelling and high-latitude regions. Global estimates of the strength of bottom-up and top-down controls within plankton size classes suggest that these large-scale gradients in Z : P ratios are driven by a shift from strong bottom-up, nutrient limitation in the oligotrophic gyres to the dominance of top-down, grazing controls in more productive regions.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available