A Lagrangian model for drifting ecosystems reveals heterogeneity-driven enhancement of marine plankton blooms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Lagrangian model that captures how physical oceanic processes like strain and diffusion influence heterogeneity and enhance phytoplankton blooms in drifting marine ecosystems.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that tracks water patches and their internal heterogeneity, linking physical dynamics to ecological responses in marine ecosystems.

Findings

Physical processes cause several-fold variations in plankton biomass response.

Heterogeneity driven by oceanic strain and diffusion significantly impacts ecosystem productivity.

The model highlights the importance of accounting for physical heterogeneity in ecosystem modeling.

Abstract

Marine plankton play a crucial role in carbon storage, oxygen production, global climate, and ecosystem function. Planktonic ecosystems are embedded in a Lagrangian patches of water that are continuously moving, stretching, and diluting. These processes drive inhomegeneities on a range of scales, with implications for the integrated ecosystem properties, but are hard to characterize. We present a theoretical framework which accounts for all these aspects; tracking the water patch hosting a drifting ecosystem along with its physical, environmental, and biochemical features. The model resolves patch dilution and internal physical mixing as a function of oceanic strain and diffusion. Ecological dynamics are parameterized by an idealized nutrient and phytoplankton population and we specifically capture the propagation of the biochemical spatial variances to represent within-patch heterogeneity. We find that, depending only on the physical processes to which the water patch is subjected, the plankton biomass response to a resource perturbation can vary several fold. This work indicates that we must account for these processes when interpreting and modelling marine ecosystems and provides a framework with which to do so.