Collaborative Research: Copepods in a Warming Climate: A Pan-Regional Model of Arctic and Northwest Atlantic Systems

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The goal of GLOBEC is to understand the underlying biological-physical interactions that determine how climate change affects abundance of marine animals. The GLOBEC approach focuses on individuals and populations dynamics of target species. This study will address major PRS themes by examining the influence of climate on physical and biological processes for a synthetic understanding of how basin- and global-scales changes in climate force physical processes that control local and panregional-scale biological communities. The investigators will use the approaches suggested in the RFP, including panregional physical-biological modeling, by connecting and comparing NWA and Arctic Ocean regions. As part of the GLOBEC NW Atlantic (NWA) program, they developed a 3D biological-physical model to examine effects of climate forced boundary conditions on plankton and dominant copepod species dynamics in the Georges Bank-Gulf of Maine region. Separately, they have also developed a new 3D model of the Arctic Ocean (AO) region and are using it to examine transport of dominant copepod species. As yet, these two models have not been connected to each other. In this pan-regional study, the investigators will combine these models to study linkages between these two systems under scenarios of global warming. They will examine a series of hypotheses that address how dominant copepod species populations in these regions may interact under future warming conditions. Specifically they will use the combined model together with existing data on abundances and vital rates to study how a melting Arctic is likely to affect the distribution and abundance of copepod species across the whole of the Arctic-North Atlantic panregional domain. The proposed work involves four steps: 1) merge the NWA and AO physical models via a new global model grid, extending their lower food web model (NPZD) across the pan-regional domain, to generate present and future (2050) environmental conditions. 2) use these modeled environmental conditions together with life histories of key species to determine their population growth potential within and across regions, 3) use an individual based model (IBM) parameterized for key species to examine effects of transport and behavior on population growth and resulting pan-regional distribution patterns, 4) develop a new evolutionary IBM for a generic copepod to determine selection of optimal life history traits under existing and future (warm) conditions across the pan-regional domain.This detailed, process-oriented, pan-regional modeling study will provide new insights into the biological-physical mechanisms that determine how global warming affects populations of key marine zooplankton species, which occupy a central position in marine food webs. The resulting model will provide a powerful new tool for understanding how pan-regional interactions control ecology and biogeography of dominant marine species.Results of this work will be broadly disseminated to the general oceanographic community, K-12 institutions, and to the population at large, through web-based servers using existing infrastructure at the proposers? institutions. Web-based users can access model results and run the model using chosen parameter settings to obtain predictions of currents, hydrography, and plankton abundance patterns given selected climate forcing scenarios. The investigators will sponsor undergraduate students in scientific and public outreach aspects of the project. Collaboration with the NE COSEE, SEA LAB, and Whyville programs for educational outreach with K12 students and the public both nationally and internationally.