There is an increasing concern about the interactions between phytoplankton and coastal ecosystems, especially on the negative effects from coastal eutrophication and phyto-plankton blooms. As the key indicator of the coastal ecosystem, phytoplankton plays an important role in the whole impact-effect chain. Primary production by phytoplankton forms the basic link in the food-chain. A lot of eff...

A model for nutrient-phytoplankton dynamics is constructed and analyzed. A theoretical analysis shows that changes in the nutrient input can significantly change the qualitative behavior of the phytoplankton dynamics. In particular, the behavior can change from asymptotically stable to periodic. Numerical solutions of the model are carried out for seasonal nutrient inputs of a range of differen...

Essential fatty acids (EFA), which are primarily generated by phytoplankton, limit growth and reproduction in diverse heterotrophs. The biochemical composition of phytoplankton is well-known to be governed both by phylogeny and environmental conditions. Nutrients, light, salinity, and temperature all affect both phytoplankton growth and fatty acid composition. However, the relative importance o...

To improve our mechanistic understanding and predictive capacities with respect to climate change effects on the spring phytoplankton bloom in temperate marine systems, we used a process-driven dynamical model to disentangle the impact of potentially relevant factors which are often correlated in the field. The model was based on comprehensive indoor mesocosm experiments run at four temperature...

A central challenge of coastal ecology is sorting out the interacting spatial and temporal components of environmental variability that combine to drive changes in phytoplankton biomass. For 2 decades, we have combined sustained observation and experimentation in South San Francisco Bay (SSFB) with numerical modeling analyses to search for general principles that define phytoplankton population...

Pigment-based chemotaxonomy and CHEMTAX software have proven to be a valuable phytoplankton monitoring tool in marine environments, but are yet underdeveloped to determine algal assemblages in freshwater ecosystems. The main objectives of this study were (1) to compare the results of direct microscopy and CHEMTAX in describing phytoplankton community composition dynamics in a large, shallow and...

Our long-term goal is to understand how physical-biological, biological-biological and chemicalbiological interactions control the patch structure and ecology of phytoplankton inhabiting coastal shelves, upwelling areas, fjords and banks. We are especially interested in ways in which speciesspecific properties, including colony size and shape (diatoms) and motility (flagellates and photosynthet...

Our long-term goal is to understand how physical-biological, biological-biological and chemicalbiological interactions control the patch structure and ecology of phytoplankton inhabiting coastal shelves, upwelling areas, fjords and banks. We are especially interested in ways in which speciesspecific properties, including colony size and shape (diatoms) and motility (flagellates and photosynthet...

The first winter in the life cycle of Antarctic krill Euphausia superba is a critical period in which larval survival and recruitment to the adult population are highly sensitive to environmental conditions, yet little is known about larval physiological dynamics during this period. An individual-based model was developed to investigate patterns of larval krill growth and condition factor in re...