Projecting marine plankton responses to climate change using realized niches

海洋浮游植物是一种单细胞、微小的光合作用生物体，分布在世界海洋的100米以上。总体而言，它们承担着地球上约一半的光合作用，并为整个海洋食物网提供资源。光合作用将无机碳转化为有机碳，由于一些有机碳沉入深海，浮游植物在从大气中清除二氧化碳方面发挥了积极作用。微型和中型浮游动物是营养转移和向深海输出光合碳的主要生物。海洋中的许多条件将在下个世纪发生变化，包括温度、表面风速、混合层的深度，以及浮游植物生长所需的营养资源的分布。因此，浮游生物生产力的变化预计会对海洋食物网和碳的生物地球化学循环产生影响。目前关于浮游生物生理学和生态学的知识不足以对预期的变化做出可信的预测。 我将使用浮游生物存在和丰度的空间和时间调查，以及温度、盐度、资源可获得性和表层海洋混合等环境数据，制作描述数十种浮游植物和浮游动物物种的有利条件的模型。这些模型既可以用来描述对每个物种有利的栖息地的特征，也可以用来预测何时何地发现每个物种。这些模型可以用于几个方面：(1)填补我们对当代海洋非常稀少的样本的空白，开发更详细的浮游生物生物地理和季节性地图，(2)在未来海洋条件模型的指导下，预测未来海洋浮游生物生物地理的变化，以及(3)研究这些物种分布模型在多大程度上是恒定的或可能随着时间的推移而变化的，对于具有生态重要性的浮游植物和浮游动物物种而言。 该项目的工作将增加我们对海洋食物网基础的了解，有助于为未来一个世纪浮游植物和浮游动物分布的变化制定详细的假设，并将指导复杂3D海洋模型的开发人员改进浮游生物在这些模型中的表示。

Marine phytoplankton are unicellular, microscopic photosynthetic organisms found throughout the upper 100 m of the world's oceans. In aggregate they are responsible for about half of the total of all photosynthesis on Earth and provide the resources for the entire marine food web. Photosynthesis converts inorganic carbon to organic carbon and since some of the organic carbon sinks into the deep ocean, phytoplankton play an active role in removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Micro- and mesozooplankton are the primary organisms which mediate both trophic transfer and export of photosynthetic carbon to the deep sea. Many conditions in the oceans will change over the next century including temperature, surface wind speeds, the depth of the mixed layer, and the distribution of nutrient resources required by phytoplankton to grow. Thus changes in the productivity of plankton are expected with consequences for the marine food web and the biogeochemical cycling of carbon. Current knowledge of plankton physiology and ecology is insufficient to make credible projections of the anticipated changes. I will use spatial and temporal surveys of plankton presence and abundance, together with environmental data such as temperature, salinity, the availability of resources, and mixing of the surface ocean to produce models describing the conditions favourable to each of dozens of phytoplankton and zooplankton species. These models can be used to both characterize the habitats favourable to each species and to project when and where each species will be found. These models can be used in several ways: (1) to fill in gaps in our very sparse sampling of the contemporary ocean and develop more detailed maps of plankton biogeography and seasonality, (2) to make projections of changes in the biogeography of plankton in the future ocean, guided by models of future ocean conditions, and (3) to study the extent these species distribution models are constant or are likely to change over time, for ecologically important phytoplankton and zooplankton species. The work in this project will increase our knowledge of the base of the marine food web, help develop detailed hypotheses for changes in phytoplankton and zooplankton distributions over the coming century, and will guide developers of complex 3d ocean models as they improve the representation of plankton in these models.