Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Publication Date
9-2018
Journal
Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science
Volume
196
First Page
123
Last Page
133
Abstract
Although both local processes (photosynthesis, respiration, grazing, and settling), and transport processes (advective transport and diffusive transport) significantly affect local phytoplankton dynamics, it is difficult to separate their contributions and to investigate the relative importance of each process to the local variability of phytoplankton biomass over different timescales. A method of using the transport rate is introduced to quantify the contribution of transport processes. By combining the time-varying transport rate and high-frequency observed chlorophyll a data, we can explicitly examine the impact of local and transport processes on phytoplankton biomass over a range of timescales from hourly to annually. For the Upper James River, results show that the relative importance of local and transport processes differs on different timescales. Local processes dominate phytoplankton variability on daily to weekly timescales, whereas the contribution of transport processes increases on seasonal to annual timescales and reaches equilibrium with local processes. With the use of the transport rate and high-frequency chlorophyll a data, a method similar to the open water oxygen method for metabolism is also presented to estimate phytoplankton primary production.
Keywords
Phytoplankton, Transport Rate, Biomass, James River - VA
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Publication Statement
This is the post-print/ accepted version of the article.
Recommended Citation
Quin, Qubin and Shen, Jian, The contribution of local and transport processes to phytoplankton biomass variability over different timescales in the Upper James River, Virginia (2018). Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, 196, 123-133.
