Descripción del proyecto
Estudio del fitoplancton para anticiparse a los efectos del cambio climático
El fitoplancton marino ofrece una perspectiva vital sobre los ciclos del carbono y el cambio climático. Teniendo en cuenta su importancia, una mayor investigación sobre su funcionamiento podría proporcionar herramientas para predecir los efectos del cambio climático. En el proyecto PHY-GO, financiado con fondos europeos, se empleará el despliegue mundial de flotadores de análisis autónomos, equipados con sensores biogeoquímicos, para aportar nuevos conocimientos sobre los procesos y la distribución del fitoplancton. Su equipo estudiará la estructura de la comunidad de fitoplancton y la comparará con las señales bioópticas detectadas por los flotadores. Además desarrollará y aplicará nuevos datos y técnicas a su investigación mediante la combinación de métodos innovadores de citometría de flujo y evaluaciones bioópticas precisas.
Objetivo
Marine phytoplankton are a primary vector in the transport of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean interior via the biological carbon pump. The magnitude and efficiency of this flux hinges on phytoplankton community structure—the relative abundance of different phytoplankton groups present within a given water mass. Therefore, accurate estimates of phytoplankton community structure are crucial for understanding global carbon cycles and for anticipating the impact of global climate change. Phytoplankton distributions within the global ocean are typically inferred from bio-optical proxies reflecting phytoplankton physiology (e.g. chlorophyll fluorescence) or concentrations of particulate carbon (e.g. attenuation coefficients or optical backscatter coefficients). The deployment of biogeochemical Argo (BGC-Argo) autonomous profiling floats is transforming the global coverage of these measurements, providing new insight into connections between phytoplankton distributions and export processes. However, few studies have evaluated relationships between bio-optical proxies as measured by BGC-Argo floats and direct measurements of phytoplankton community structure, and none have performed an intercomparison of these relationships across different ocean basins. Therefore, I propose to 1) utilize a combination of novel and existing flow cytometry methods to estimate group-specific phytoplankton biomass across four disparate ocean provinces, 2) evaluate the bio-optical proxies that best predict group-specific phytoplankton biomass within each province, 3) leverage relationships identified in objective 2 to develop a novel transfer function for estimating phytoplankton biomass based on bio-optical proxies alone, and 4) apply this function to existing BGC-Argo data to quantify the importance of variability in phytoplankton community structure to carbon export to the mesopelagic zone, as compared to other mechanisms.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-PF - MSCA-PFCoordinador
75006 Paris
Francia