2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting

February 21-26

Food-web structure largely shapes biogeochemical cycles, including marine microbes that determine key biochemical transformations and larger plankton that mediate material processes such as particle packaging and transport.  However, the mechanisms that link microbial and planktonic trophic processes to gravitational flux and elemental cycling remain poorly characterized.  The interaction of simultaneous processes such as phytoplankton production and physiology, zooplankton trophic dynamics, microbial remineralization, physical advection and mixing, obscure prediction of key biogeochemical processes including the biological carbon pump.  A mechanistic understanding is difficulted by the lack of simultaneous measurements of carbon cycling and plankton processes.  Prediction of global biogeochemical cycling is further complicated by the range of scales across which these processes operate and are understood.  Estimation of elemental cycles requires an appreciation of the scaling rules connecting cellular metabolism to global inventories and fluxes. However, the empirically derived or assumed scaling rules to make these conversions are rarely discussed or tested, despite the frequent mismatch between measurements and models made over different time and space scales.  We invite contributions that investigate mechanisms linking plankton trophic processes to biogeochemical cycling and carbon export, and studies that compare and contrast measurements of plankton metabolism with resultant models of biogeochemical fluxes.

• ME - Marine Ecosystems
• PP - Phytoplankton and Primary Production