Ecological Determinants of Oceanic Carbon Cycling (EDOCC)

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9908649 Recent research results in diverse areas qualitatively confirm the importance of upper ocean biological processes in determining the role of the oceans in global carbon flux. Furthermore, the oceanic microbiota have emerged as an intergral component in oceanic carbon cycling and in the ocean response to near term (decadal scale) climate fluctuations. The compelling evidence of biological controls and the availability of powerful new methodologies(e.g. molecular ecology, remote sensing) provide us with an unprecedented opportunity. It is within our reach to define explicitly the diversity of interactions of the oceanic microbiota with key carbon pools and, moreover, the controls on these interactions over the relevant time and space scales needed to place these processes in a global context. We therefore propose to undertake a focused workshop to bring together leaders in the field of marine microbial ecology and biogeochemistry 1) to review the salient aspects of recent advances and 2) to clearly identify and articulate the key research objectives for the next decade which will most greatly promote our understanding of the marine biota in carbon cycling. Our ultimate goal is to develop a sufficient mechanistic knowledge of these systems to allow prediction of the response of the oceanic microbiota to environmental perturbations with respect to carbon cycling. An explicit outcome of the workshop will be recommendations for the critical research areas for the next decade that will best foster this objective.