The Effects of Pigment Photooxidation and Biogenic Source on the Absorption of Light by Detritus Derived from Phytoplankton

将研究影响浮游植物来源的生物碎屑的色素含量、光谱吸收和光化学性质的过程。据推测，碎屑类叶绿素、色素和类胡萝卜素的光氧化速率通过降解而耦合，机理问题将在实验室实验中解决，一些实验采用碎屑色素的模型系统。研究了食草动物群落组成对生物碎屑光谱特征的影响。将测定桡足类和异养性原生动物的颗粒废物的色素含量、光谱吸收和依赖于光的色素漂白率。颜料将用高效液相色谱进行分析。颗粒吸收光谱(过滤后的材料)将通过溶剂提取被分割成组分光谱。将评估相对光稳定、具有类似腐殖质光谱特征的碎屑组分的潜在吸收。负责海洋大部分生物生产的微型植物含有吸收阳光的色素，就像陆地上的植物一样。长期以来，这些色素一直被用来通过对给定水体中存在的叶绿素的数量进行直接化学分析来量化海洋浮游植物。最近，可以根据浮游植物赋予水的颜色来远程测量浮游植物分布的发现，为大规模海洋生产分析打开了令人兴奋的机会。纳尔逊对与各种海洋放牧环境相关的色素差异的研究，可能会导致从远程收集的光学数据中提取更多的生态信息的能力，而不仅仅是植物生物量的静态差异。研究色素降解机制的方法可能允许对生物动力学的实际分析，如海洋食物网动力学和颗粒通量。

Processes affecting the pigment content, spectral absorption, and photochemical properties of biogenic detritus derived from phytoplankton will be investigated. It is hypothesized that the rates of photooxidation of detrital chlorophylls, pheopigments, and carotenoids are coupled through a degradation, and the question of mechanism will be addressed in laboratory experiments, some employing a model system for detrital pigments. The effect of grazer community composition on the spectral character of biogenic detritus will be examined. Pigment content, spectral absorption, and the rates of light-dependent pigment bleaching will be determined for the particulate wastes of copepods and heterothrophic protozoans. Pigments will be analyed by high performance liquid chromatography. Particulate absorption spectra (filtered material) will be partitioned into component spectra by solvent extraction. The potential absorption of a relatively light-stable detrital fraction, of humic-like spectral character, will be assessed. The microscopic plants that are responsible for most of the ocean's biological production contain pigments for absorbing sunlight just as their terrestrial counterparts do. These pigments have long been used to quantify marine phytoplankton through direct chemical analysis of the amount of chlorophyll present in a given body of water. Recently, the discovery that phytoplankton distributions can be measured remotely based on the color they impart to the water has opened up exciting opportunities for the large scale analysis of marine production. Nelson's work on the pigment differences associated with various marine grazing environments may result in the ability to extract much more ecological information from remotely collected optical data than just the static differences in plant biomass. The approach of examining the mechanisms of pigment degration may allow for the actual analysis of biological dynamics such as marine food web dynamics and particle flux.