Collaborative Research: Phytoplankton Phenology in the Antarctic: Drivers, Patterns, and Implications for the Adelie Penguin

合作研究：南极浮游植物物候学：对阿德利企鹅的驱动因素、模式和影响

• 批准号: 1341474
• 负责人: Heather Lynch
• 金额: $ 10.8万
• 依托单位: SUNY at Stony Brook
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1341474&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Phytoplankton; Phenology; Antarctic

The aim of study is to understand how climate-related changes in snow and ice affect predator populations in the Antarctic, using the Adélie penguin as a focal species due to its long history as a Southern Ocean 'sentinel' species and the number of long-term research programs monitoring its abundance, distribution, and breeding biology. Understanding the environmental factors that control predator population dynamics is critically important for projecting the state of populations under future climate change scenarios, and for designing better conservation strategies for the Antarctic ecosystem. For the first time, datasets from a network of observational sites for the Adélie penguin across the entire Antarctic will be combined and analyzed, with a focus on linkages among the ice environment, primary production, and the population responses of Adélie penguins. The project will also further the NSF goals of making scientific discoveries available to the general public and of training new generations of scientists. The results of this project can be used to illustrate intuitively to the general public the complex interactions between ice, ocean, pelagic food web and top predators. This project also offers an excellent platform to demonstrate the process of climate-change science - how scientists simulate climate change scenarios and interpret model results. This project supports the training of undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of polar oceanography, plankton and seabird ecology, coupled physical-biological modeling and mathematical ecology. The results will be broadly disseminated to the general oceanographic research community through scientific workshops, conferences and peer-reviewed journal articles, and to undergraduate and graduate education communities, K-12 schools and organizations, and the interested public through web-based servers using existing infrastructure at the investigators' institutions. The key question to be addressed in this project is how climate impacts the timing of periodic biological events (phenology) and how interannual variation in this periodic forcing influences the abundance of penguins in the Antarctic. The focus will be on the timing of ice algae and phytoplankton blooms because the high seasonality of sea ice and associated pulsed primary productivity are major drivers of the Antarctic food web. This study will also examine the responses of Adélie penguins to changes in sea ice dynamics and ice algae-phytoplankton phenology. Adélie penguins, like many other Antarctic seabirds, are long-lived, upper trophic-level predators that integrate the effects of sea ice on the food web at regional scales, and thus serve as a reliable biological indicator of environmental changes. The proposed approach is designed to accommodate the limits of measuring and modeling the intermediate trophic levels between phytoplankton and penguins (e.g., zooplankton and fish) at the pan-Antarctic scale, which are important but latent variables in the Southern Ocean food web. Through the use of remotely sensed and in situ data, along with state of the art statistical approaches (e.g. wavelet analysis) and numerical modeling, this highly interdisciplinary study will advance our understanding of polar ecosystems and improve the projection of future climate change scenarios.

这项研究的目的是了解与气候相关的冰雪变化如何影响南极捕食者种群，以阿德利企鹅作为重点物种，因为它作为南大洋“哨兵”物种的悠久历史，以及监测其丰度、分布和繁殖生物学的长期研究项目的数量。 了解控制捕食者种群动态的环境因素对于预测未来气候变化情景下的种群状况以及为南极生态系统设计更好的保护策略至关重要。首次将来自整个南极洲阿德利企鹅观测点网络的数据集进行合并和分析，重点关注冰环境、初级生产和阿德利企鹅种群反应之间的联系。该项目还将进一步推进国家科学基金会的目标，即向公众提供科学发现和培训新一代科学家。该项目的结果可以用来向公众直观地说明冰、海洋、中上层食物网和顶级捕食者之间复杂的相互作用。该项目还提供了一个绝佳的平台来展示气候变化科学的进程——科学家如何模拟气候变化情景并解释模型结果。该项目支持极地海洋学、浮游生物和海鸟生态学、物理生物耦合建模和数学生态学领域本科生和研究生的培训。研究结果将通过科学研讨会、会议和同行评审的期刊文章广泛传播给一般海洋学研究界，并利用研究人员机构的现有基础设施，通过基于网络的服务器广泛传播给本科生和研究生教育界、K-12学校和组织以及感兴趣的公众。该项目要解决的关键问题是气候如何影响周期性生物事件（物候）的时间以及这种周期性强迫的年际变化如何影响南极企鹅的丰度。重点将放在冰藻和浮游植物繁殖的时间上，因为海冰的高季节性和相关的脉冲初级生产力是南极食物网的主要驱动力。这项研究还将研究阿德利企鹅对海冰动力学和冰藻-浮游植物物候学变化的反应。阿德利企鹅和许多其他南极海鸟一样，是长寿的上层营养级掠食者，它们在区域范围内整合了海冰对食物网的影响，因此可以作为环境变化的可靠生物指标。所提出的方法旨在适应泛南极尺度浮游植物和企鹅（例如浮游动物和鱼类）之间的中间营养水平测量和建模的限制，这是南大洋食物网中重要但潜在的变量。 通过使用遥感和实地数据，以及最先进的统计方法（例如小波分析）和数值建模，这项高度跨学科的研究将增进我们对极地生态系统的理解，并改善对未来气候变化情景的预测。