2007 - Pan Regional Synthesis: Funded Projects
Abstracts
US GLOBEC Pan-Regional Synthesis--Comparative Ecology of Krill in Coastal and Oceanic Waters around the Pacific Rim
This project will synthesize the knowledge of North Pacific krill through modeling and comparative studies, across U.S. GLOBEC, Japan-GLOBEC, China-GLOBEC and related study regions, with the goal of understanding climate impacts on euphausiids in the North Pacific. The project will address the following research themes: 1) Identify the processes controlling the population dynamics and recruitment of krill as a function of ecosystem type and ascertain how these processes would be affected by climate change, to be accomplished through comparing and contrasting population responses from a number of different ecosystems, and; 2) Determine the response of krill populations at local and regional scales to basin- and global-scale change in climate forcing.
Intellectual Merit: Krill research funded by GLOBEC since 1998, and other research conducted by biological oceanographers in the U.S. and other nations bordering the North Pacific (China, Korea, Japan, Russia, Canada), have produced new information on the phenology, seasonal cycles of abundance, feeding, reproduction, and growth rates of North Pacific krill. This knowledge will be summarized into a series of multi-authored synthesis papers that focus on comparative life history of krill, how local populations interact with local ocean conditions, and how climate impacts these processes. This project will address questions such as: 1)What are the seasonal variations in distribution, abundance, growth rates and egg production in krill populations, and how do they vary regionally around the Pacific Rim? 2) Are growth rates and brood sizes related to seasonal cycles of primary production? 3) How do populations in the eastern and western Pacific respond to ENSO and PDO cycles? 4) How are individuals of the same species (Euphausia pacifica) adapted to survive year-around in the very warm water regions of the Yellow Sea, East China Sea and Japan/East Sea; what mechanisms enable individuals to survive the long winters in northern regions, e.g., the Gulf of Alaska, Sea of Okhotsk and northern California Current? 5) What interactions between physical transport and life-stage dependent dynamics control the local scale distributions of krill and are similar interactions important at regional and basin-scales?
All krill research carried out within the U.S. GLOBEC study regions (California Current and Gulf of Alaska) will be summarized, as will research carried out by our overseas collaborators. Metadata summaries will be produced. Krill experts from each nation will produce local "State of our Krill Knowledge" reports. Using these reports, joint multi-authored monographs and collaborative papers on krill ecology will be written. Furthermore, two international symposia on krill ecology will be convened.
Broader Impacts: This synthesis project will support one graduate student and involve three young scientists in China and Japan. Furthermore, krill are harvested in Japan and Canada, and pressure will soon mount to allow harvest elsewhere. Results of this synthesis will contribute to an assessment of krill resources and vulnerability in coastal ecosystems around the Pacific Rim. A tangible product of this research is a monograph of the population ecology, life history strategies, and interactions of krill with their environment in multiple regions of the North Pacific.
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Collaborative Research: Comparative Analysis of Salmon and Cod Population Responses
In GLOBEC investigations, causality is often inferred from observed covariability between environmental indicators and populations, but mechanisms of action (e.g., an effect on individual growth rate or survival at a certain age) are seldom known, though they are frequently hypothesized. The population dynamic effects of the mechanism of action are seldom elucidated, and investigators are often not aware of the population dynamic differences between variability at different ages or between variability in survival or growth. However, research in population dynamics is increasing awareness of the differences these make in terms of sensitivity of populations to the environment and the time scales of variability of the environmental forcing and the response. Salmon and cod are two taxa that have been of interest to GLOBEC and they span the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in the Northern Hemisphere. Their populations vary spatially in development rates and the consequent distribution of spawning ages, and they experience inter-annual temporal variability in both survival at various ages and development rates (and spawning age distributions). The investigators will examine the role of the differences that population dynamics makes in structuring the different responses of various salmon and cod populations to environmental variability and climate change. Specifically, they will describe how the mechanism of action (variable growth rate or survival rate at age) influence population sensitivity to environmental fluctuations at various time scales, including expected time scales of population response. Examples of similar studies include out elucidation of the differences in population responses of coho and chinook salmon to the regime shift in the mid-1970s due to differences in spawning age distributions. Discovering that the expected differences were slight re-focused attention on other potential causes of the differences in response. Another example is identification of the causes of cohort resonance in cod and the drawing of attention to the fact that increasing resonance (sensitivity to specific time scales of environmental variability) also led to increasing sensitivity to variability at very low frequencies such as might be seen in climate change. Concern was expressed that this heightened sensitivity to random noise could interfere with attempts to detect slow climate change.
A societal benefit will be derived from this investigation of how the addition of fishing mortality rate changes the basic response of populations to environmentally induced variability in development rates and survival rates at various ages. This will aid in the risk analysis associated with fishery management. Also, description of the expected scales of variability to which populations will be sensitive will aid in the design and analysis of ocean observing systems. From a human resources point of view, this project will be train one student and two postdoctoral scholars.
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Collaborative Research: Climate Variability and Change in the U.S. GLOBEC Regions as Simulated by the IPCC Climate Models: Ecosystem Implications
A large body of literature has shown that ecosystem dynamics is strongly influenced by large scale climate variations. A primary way by which climate can affect marine biological processes is through wind-driven changes of the ocean circulation, which are influenced by both natural and anthropogenically-induced variability. Simulations performed with 23 state-of-the-art climate models in support of the Intergovermental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 4 (AR4) are the principle means for examining climate change. The IPCC-AR4 simulations include runs with fixed external (solar, volcanoes, greenhouse gases) forcing (control simulations), as well as simulations where external forcing is prescribed according to the observed 20th century record (20th century simulations) or according to different climate change scenarios. These climate integrations are global and provide complete information on a large number of variables, including those relevant for marine ecosystems, at each model grid point. The output from the IPCC-AR4 simulations will be used to examine climate variability and change in the three GLOBEC regions (northeast Pacific, northwest Atlantic, and Southern Ocean) focusing on the following questions:
- Does the present generation of climate models show connections between large-scale low-frequency wind forcing variations and ocean circulation changes in the three GLOBEC study areas similar to those that are believed to exist in nature? Can the IPCC-AR4 multi-model ensembles be used to extend the observational record and test hypotheses on the climate-circulation links with a larger statistical confidence?
- Based on the most reliable climate models, to what extent will the influence of climate upon regional processes change over the 21st and 22nd centuries?
- Can statistical downscaling methods be developed and used for relating variations at the regional (ecosystem) scale to large-scale climate forcing? Can specific parameters be identified that are more amenable to statistical downscaling?
The first question will be addressed by analyzing the control and 20th century simulations, while projections of the influence of climate on regional processes in the next century will be examined using the scenario simulations. Available data, as well as output from a regional model at different resolutions will be used to assess the feasibility of statistical downscaling.
This study will improve understanding of the links between large-scale climate forcing and physical processes important for ecosystem dynamics in different regions. The global nature of climate models enables a consistent means of establishing connections within and between different geographical regions. Thus, results from this study support the pan-regional synthesis phase of the GLOBEC program.
The present study has the potential to enhance the ability to predict ecosystem changes due to natural and/or anthropogenically induced climate variations. Results from this project can support regional ecosystem studies by providing a perspective of the large-scale forcing and its evolution in a changing climate, as well as boundary condition and forcing fields for regional models. Specifically, a key aspect of this project will be to provide output from the IPPC model simulations and guidance in how to use the output to other researchers funded through this phase of the GLOBEC program. Results from this study will also be presented to middle and high school students through the outreach programs at NOAA and at the investigators' Universities.
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Collaborative Research: Copepods in a Warming Climate: A Pan-Regional Model of Arctic and Northwest Atlantic Systems
The goal of GLOBEC is to understand the underlying biological-physical interactions that determine how climate change affects abundance of marine animals. The GLOBEC approach focuses on individuals and populations dynamics of target species. This study will address major PRS themes by examining the influence of climate on physical and biological processes for a synthetic understanding of how basin- and global-scales changes in climate force physical processes that control local and panregional-scale biological communities. The investigators will use the approaches suggested in the RFP, including panregional physical-biological modeling, by connecting and comparing NWA and Arctic Ocean regions. As part of the GLOBEC NW Atlantic (NWA) program, they developed a 3D biological-physical model to examine effects of climate forced boundary conditions on plankton and dominant copepod species dynamics in the Georges Bank-Gulf of Maine region. Separately, they have also developed a new 3D model of the Arctic Ocean (AO) region and are using it to examine transport of dominant copepod species. As yet, these two models have not been connected to each other. In this pan-regional study, the investigators will combine these models to study linkages between these two systems under scenarios of global warming. They will examine a series of hypotheses that address how dominant copepod species populations in these regions may interact under future warming conditions. Specifically they will use the combined model together with existing data on abundances and vital rates to study how a melting Arctic is likely to affect the distribution and abundance of copepod species across the whole of the Arctic-North Atlantic panregional domain. The proposed work involves four steps: 1) merge the NWA and AO physical models via a new global model grid, extending their lower food web model (NPZD) across the pan-regional domain, to generate present and future (2050) environmental conditions. 2) use these modeled environmental conditions together with life histories of key species to determine their population growth potential within and across regions, 3) use an individual based model (IBM) parameterized for key species to examine effects of transport and behavior on population growth and resulting pan-regional distribution patterns, 4) develop a new evolutionary IBM for a generic copepod to determine selection of optimal life history traits under existing and future (warm) conditions across the pan-regional domain.
This detailed, process-oriented, pan-regional modeling study will provide new insights into the biological-physical mechanisms that determine how global warming affects populations of key marine zooplankton species, which occupy a central position in marine food webs. The resulting model will provide a powerful new tool for understanding how pan-regional interactions control ecology and biogeography of dominant marine species.
Results of this work will be broadly disseminated to the general oceanographic community, K-12 institutions, and to the population at large, through web-based servers using existing infrastructure at the proposers? institutions. Web-based users can access model results and run the model using chosen parameter settings to obtain predictions of currents, hydrography, and plankton abundance patterns given selected climate forcing scenarios. The investigators will sponsor undergraduate students in scientific and public outreach aspects of the project. Collaboration with the NE COSEE, SEA LAB, and Whyville programs for educational outreach with K12 students and the public both nationally and internationally.
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Collaborative Research: GLOBEC Pan-regional Synthesis: Pacific Ocean Boundary Ecosystems: response to natural and anthropogenic climate forcing
Intellectual Merits: Large-scale decadal Pacific climate indices such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) have been linked to changes across multiple trophic levels of marine ecosystems along the eastern and western boundaries. Recent studies of the Northeast Pacific show that other independent climate modes are equally important in explaining changes in coastal ocean upwelling and transport dynamics - the fundamental processes controlling regional nutrient fluxes and planktonic ecosystem dynamics. This suggests that the interplay of forcing functions associated with multiple large-scale climate modes must be considered to adequately diagnose the dynamics and mechanics underlying variations in regional ecosystems. With this framework, this project combines extensive national and international in situ and satellite observations with numerical and statistical physical-biological models to diagnose the response of four Pacific boundary ecosystems to large-scale natural and anthropogenic climate forcing. The focus regions are: the Gulf of Alaska, the California Current System, the Peru-Chile Current System , and the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension region. This goal will be approached through four core research objectives. First, the extent to which, and by which mechanisms, large-scale climate modes (e.g. PDO, NPGO, ENSO, and others) drove coherent changes across Pacific boundary ecosystems over the period 1960-2007 will be investigated. Second, the investigators will quantify and explain how changes in regional ocean processes (e.g. upwelling, transport dynamics, mixing and mesoscale structure) at each boundary control phytoplankton and zooplankton dynamics. Those results will be used to test the degree to which changes in each study region reflect bottom-up control of their respective ecosystems. Third, the extent to which changes in the statistics of shorter-period events (e.g. intra-seasonal oscillation, timing of spring transitions) during different phases of the longer-period climate modes (e.g. PDO, NPGO and others) determine the climate state of boundary-current ecosystems will be quantified. Finally, the range of uncertainties in the response of regional ocean dynamics and their ecosystems to climate change using forcing scenarios from selected climate model integrations that are part of the IPCC 2007 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report will be explored. This last objective will begin an assessment of the potential impacts of climate change on regional ocean ecosystems, a topic poorly addressed in the latest IPCC report, but the chief instrument for most fisheries and coastal management. The success of these analyses relies on the diverse expertise of the investigators, which include physical biological observations, numerical regional ocean ecosystem modeling, statistical physical-biological modeling and IPCC coupled climate model projections.
Broader Impacts: This project will provide an improved and unified understanding of low-frequency ecosystem dynamics in the economically vital eastern and western boundaries of the Pacific Ocean. It will also deliver new methodologies for assessing the uncertainties associated with regional climate change in marine ecosystems with direct implication for fisheries management and future assessment of the IPCC. The project team represents a close collaboration of academic and government scientists, and the research will be conducted with the support of international collaborators from South America, Japan and Canada. These collaborations will provide training for both international and US students through scientific exchanges, expanding the international network for both the US investigators and foreign collaborators. Four young PIs will be supported, including three female scientists, two of which have no previous NSF support or other sources of funding. Activities and results from this project will also extend to the undergraduate students through REU programs, and underserved high school students through the SMILE (Science and Math Investigative Learning Experiences) Program.
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Collaborative Research: GLOBEC Pan Regional Synthesis: The Effect of Varying Freshwater Inputs on Regional Ecosystems in the North Atlantic
This research addresses several mechanisms by which freshwater influx might impact the primary production of Calanus finmarchicus in the northern North Atlantic Ocean. Variability in the winter North Atlantic Oscillation index is related to changes in various physical and biological parameters across the entire North Atlantic, but the mechanisms underlying those relationships are not well known. Understanding basin-to-regional connections is important for interpreting patterns of variability observed on both sides of the Atlantic during the core GLOBEC study period (1993-1999) and from earlier observations, and inferring process, whether local or remote, from those observed patterns. The proposed research is focused on: (1) comparing and contrasting the impact of freshwater influx to the eastern and western sides of the North Atlantic, (2) understanding the development and maintenance of a possible three-gyre configuration of Calanus finmarchicus distribution in the North Atlantic, and (3) predicting the projected trends and variations in the North Atlantic Ocean based on IPCC projections for upcoming decades.
This project seeks a synthetic understanding of how basin- and global-scales changes in climate force physical processes that in turn determine local- and regional-scale biological communities, with a particular focus on freshwater forcing of circulation, mixing, and marine ecosystems within the North Atlantic Ocean. It is pan-regional in scope, building upon the successes of the U.S. GLOBEC program in the Western North Atlantic (and its other regions) to address climate variability issues spanning the entire northern North Atlantic Ocean. Its research approaches include: synthesis of datasets across the North Atlantic, multi-scale coupled physical/biological modeling, and comparative regional studies. In all these respects it responds directly to the U.S. GLOBEC Pan-Regional Synthesis Announcement of Opportunity.
Two graduate students will participate in this project. Results will be disseminated by peer-reviewed scientific publications, presentations at national conferences, and to other Pan-Regional GLOBEC investigators. Model output will be made available via the Rutgers OPeNDAP server. The investigators will give public lectures in Schools of Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey on the importance of NAO and its impact on the regional ecosystem as part of an ongoing K-12 outreach program. The forecast scenarios for the next two decades will increase awareness of Climate Change. Dr. Fei Chai is a New Investigator to the GLOBEC program and will bring considerable expertise from his associations in the Pacific and in the Climate Change communities. Finally, this project sets the stage for post-GLOBEC end-to-end studies in the North Atlantic (e.g., the BASIN program).
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Collaborative Research: GLOBEC Pan-regional Synthesis: End-to-end Energy Budgets in US-GLOBEC Regions
The research addresses the overarching question: are marine food webs leading to fisheries controlled from the top-down, the bottom up, or a combination of the two? To address this question we will (1) compare end-to-end energy budgets of the 4 US-GLOBEC study regions in the context of top-down v. bottom-up forcing, (2) assess the skills of the regional models in capturing basic material fluxes, (3) extract diagnostics from the regional models that will be used to evaluate the effects of climate change and fishing pressure across GLOBEC regions and (4) develop quantitative methods to compare the diagnostics. The major successes of GLOBEC have been in elucidating the processes underlying the dynamics of individual species in ecosystems characterized by diverse physical settings. At the same time there is an increasing demand for an ecosystem approach to management of marine resources subject to fishing pressures and climatic changes. Improving the understanding of trophic links in oceanic food webs is integral to the ability to understand and predict ecosystem responses to climate change and anthropogenic forcings. The use of state-of-the-art modeling approaches coupled to data assembly and analyses provides opportunities to train graduate students (3 included in project) in a variety of disciplines (food web modeling, data analyses, data assimilation, marine ecology) that are needed to address the important scientific and societal problems facing marine systems. The project includes 2 postdoctoral scientists, many women (9 of 22 investigators) including several in lead roles, several talented young scientists new to GLOBEC, other scientists new to GLOBEC, and an outstanding team of international collaborators (see Letter of Support from BAS). The cooperative effort among scientists from academia, government, and private industry is beneficial to all groups. The management plan centered on intensive, frequent communication via in-person, digital and electronic meetings is a unique and potentially transformative aspect of the project.
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Collaborative Research: Climate Forcing of Calanus finmarchicus Populations of the North Atlantic
The overall goal of this project is to understand the processes that regulate the large-scale distribution and abundance of Calanus finmarchicus, a keystone species of the North Atlantic ecosystem. The investigators hypothesize that three main population centers in the North Atlantic are quasi-distinct and selfsustaining. This hypothesis will be tested with combined physical-biological modeling and genetic analysis of C. finmarchicus populations. The modeling approach is to assimilate observations of C. finmarchicus from the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) into the North Atlantic Regional Ocean Modeling System using the adjoint method. The first phase of the project will be to investigate the mean seasonal cycle based on monthly mean CPR data together with the climatological mean circulation. The inverse model solution will be diagnosed to quantify the interconnectivity between the three population centers. Molecular population genetic analysis will yield independent estimates of the rates of exchange between the gyres, which will be compared with model predictions. This assessment of the climatological mean seasonal cycle will set the stage for a study of interannual variability, with particular emphasis on changes in the mean state of the system in association with the North Atlantic Oscillation.
The intellectual merit of this effort includes its interdisciplinary approach (physics and biology) and integrated analysis (adjoint modeling and molecular population genetics), which can provide new insights into complex oceanographic phenomena, such as ocean basin-scale processes, that are difficult or impossible to observe directly. Broader impacts of the proposed research will include international collaboration, as well as training of both undergraduate and graduate students. The project will use the outreach capacity of the "Census of the Marine Zooplankton," a Census of Marine Life (CoML) field project led by A. Bucklin, to ensure broad dissemination of results to researchers, students, and educators. This project will produce a video, contribute to CoML synthesis publications, and produce researcher interviews for the CoML web site.
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Collaborative Research: Estimating Ecosystem Model Uncertainties in Pan-Regional Syntheses and Climate Change Impacts on Coastal Domains of the North Pacific Ocean
A sequence of Bayesian Hierarchical Models (BHM) will be developed to synthesize coastal ecosystem dynamics and responses to climate change across focus regions bounding the North Pacific Ocean. BHM is a unified probabilistic modeling approach that updates uncertain distributional knowledge about process models and parameters in the presence of multi-platform observations. Summary measures of the resulting "posterior" distributions provide realistic quantitative estimates of central tendencies and uncertainties. The investigators will develop our process model distributions after the North Pacific Ecosystem Model for Understanding Regional Oceanography (NEMURO). So, a significant outcome of the research will be quantitative understanding and comparisons of the relative uncertainties of NEMURO state variables and parameters, region-by-region across the North Pacific. A three-step BHM development plan will address pan-regional syntheses, climate change impacts, and ecosystem management tool concepts, over a three-year schedule. The initial BHM development will be a relocatable, time-dependent, one-dimensional (vertical) model intended to summarize ecosystem dynamics for different regimes (shelf, slope, upwelling loci, boundary current extensions, etc.) within the coastal regions of interest. Data and insights from multi-disciplinary observational programs and deterministic model implementations in coastal regions of the North Pacific will be fully exploited. In addition to emphasizing field observations, the BHM methodology will incorporate deterministic model output (e.g. the Regional Ocean Modeling System or ROMS) as data, providing a rigorous and complete synthesis of the state of understanding for coastal ocean ecosystems of the North Pacific. The investigators will focus on data and models in the Eastern Pacific from parts of the US GLOBEC program (i.e. California Current System, CCS; and Coastal Gulf of Alaska, CGOA) and in the Western Pacific (WPAC) from the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES). The 1D BHM will also be implemented in climate-scale calculations to document and compare climate change impacts within and across North Pacific coastal ocean ecosystems, and to quantify uncertainties in these comparisons. The ultimate BHM implementation will be in three dimensions, accounting for mesoscale ocean dynamical impacts on the coastal ecosystem regions, and demonstrating potential ecosystem management advantages of the BHM approach.
The intellectual merit of this research derives from a novel extension of probabilistic modeling methods (i.e. BHM) to synthesize disparate observations and deterministic model simulations from coastal regions on eastern and western boundaries of a major ocean basin. Application of BHM in Biological Oceanography represents a transformative research step and introduces a new paradigm. The research proposed here combines the strengths of deterministic and probabilistic models to obtain uncertainty estimates for state variables and parameters of a modern lower-trophic level ocean ecosystem model. A broader impact of the research will be the training of postdoctoral and graduate students (in statistics and oceanography) in this new synergy of ocean modeling approaches. As ecosystem managers and scientists learn to utilize state and parameter information in probability distributions, uncertain parts of the ecosystem model can be targeted for more intensive observations and/or more sophisticated parameterizations.
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Collaborative Research: Life histories of species in the genus Calanus in the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans and responses to climate forcing
Species in the genus Calanus are predominant in the mesozooplankton of the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans. Their key role in marine food web interactions has been recognized in GLOBEC programs, both in the U.S. and internationally. Considerable knowledge of life history characteristics, including growth, reproduction, mortality, diapause behavior and demography has been acquired from both laboratory experiments and measurements at sea. This project reviews and synthesizes this knowledge and uses it to develop an Individual Based Life Cycle model for sibling species in two sympatric species pairs, C.marshallae and C. pacificus in the North Pacific Ocean and C. finmarchicus and C.helgolandicus in the North Atlantic, that have been the particular focus of GLOBEC programs and other recent research projects in the U.S., Canada and Europe. The IBLC model is then applied to make predictions about the life history response of each species to forcing under reasonable climate change scenarios for ambient food and temperature. The project involves training of a graduate student and two postdoctoral researchers in evaluation and prediction of effects of climate change on marine plankton populations. It fosters international collaboration with Canadian and European researchers, including participation in a workshop in Europe. Outreach to the broader fishing and management community is through seminars, information exchange sessions with fishermen managers, including the Maine Fisherman’s Forum, collaboration in affiliated projects with colleagues involved in herring and tuna research in the Gulf of Maine and in climate and fisheries interactions within NOAA.
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