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: 1341558
• 负责人: Rubao Ji
• 金额: $ 55.09万
• 依托单位: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• 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 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1341558&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.

研究的目的是了解与气候相关的冰雪变化是如何影响南极的捕食者种群的。研究人员将adsamlie企鹅作为重点物种，因为它长期以来一直是南大洋的“哨兵”物种，并且有大量的长期研究项目监测它的丰度、分布和繁殖生物学。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态以及设计更好的南极生态系统保护策略至关重要。这是第一次，从整个南极的阿德海默企鹅观测点的网络数据集将被合并和分析，重点是冰环境，初级生产和阿德海默企鹅的种群响应之间的联系。该项目还将进一步实现国家科学基金会的目标，即让公众获得科学发现，并培养新一代的科学家。这个项目的结果可以直观地向公众说明冰、海洋、远洋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很好的平台来展示气候变化科学的过程——科学家如何模拟气候变化情景并解释模式结果。本项目支持培养极地海洋学、浮游生物与海鸟生态学、物理-生物耦合建模和数学生态学等方向的本科生和研究生。研究结果将通过科学研讨会、会议和同行评议的期刊文章广泛传播给一般海洋学研究界，并通过使用调查机构现有基础设施的网络服务器广泛传播给本科和研究生教育社区、K-12学校和组织以及感兴趣的公众。这个项目要解决的关键问题是气候如何影响周期性生物事件（物候学）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大量繁殖的时间上，因为海冰的高度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。本研究还将探讨南极企鹅对海冰动态和冰藻-浮游植物物候变化的响应。和许多其他南极海鸟一样，南极企鹅是长寿的、上层营养层的捕食者，它们在区域尺度上综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在泛南极尺度上测量和模拟浮游植物和企鹅（如浮游动物和鱼类）之间的中间营养水平的局限性，这是南大洋食物网中重要但潜在的变量。通过使用遥感和原位数据，以及最先进的统计方法（如小波分析）和数值模拟，这项高度跨学科的研究将促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。