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Understanding how phytoplankton respond to changes in temperature and nutrient supply rates is necessary for understanding carbon flow in changing climates. The magnitude of ocean carbon storage is partly modulated by the growth rate and elemental stoichiometry of autotroph biomass, so models relating the cellular composition of phytoplankton and environmental conditions will be a useful tool. Community-wide growth rate are expected to increase with temperature, but this response is dampened when nutrients are limiting. We will discuss an adaptation of a cellular allocation model (Inomura et al., 2020) which allocates carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus to key macromolecular pools in autotrophs, such that growth rate and stoichiometry are related as a function of these pool sizes. We include temperature-dependent cellular processes based on theories of enzyme kinetics as well as explicit allocation to nutrient uptake to resolve the combined response to temperature and nutrient changes. We will employ the model to discuss how resource availability drives the response of phytoplankton to both spatial and temporal variability in these environmental parameters.
Primary Presenter: Zoe Aarons, MIT-WHOI Joint Program (zsaarons@mit.edu)
Authors:
Michael Follows, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mick@mit.edu)
CONSTRAINING THE CELLULAR RESPONSE OF PHYTOPLANKTON TO TEMPERATURE AND RESOURCE AVAILABILITY
Category
Scientific Sessions > SS040 Ecological Stoichiometry in a Dynamic World: Exploring the Ecology of Changing Environments Through Theory, Patterns, Processes and Experiments.