Collaborative Research: Phytoplankton Phenology in the Antarctic: Drivers, Patterns, and Implications for the Adelie Penguin

合作研究：南极浮游植物物候学：对阿德利企鹅的驱动因素、模式和影响

• 批准号: 1341558
• 负责人: Rubao Ji
• 金额: $ 55.09万
• 依托单位: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1341558&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Phytoplankton; Phenology; Antarctic

The aim of study is to understand how climate-related changes in snow and ice affect predator populations in the Antarctic, using the Adélie penguin as a focal species due to its long history as a Southern Ocean 'sentinel' species and the number of long-term research programs monitoring its abundance, distribution, and breeding biology. Understanding the environmental factors that control predator population dynamics is critically important for projecting the state of populations under future climate change scenarios, and for designing better conservation strategies for the Antarctic ecosystem. For the first time, datasets from a network of observational sites for the Adélie penguin across the entire Antarctic will be combined and analyzed, with a focus on linkages among the ice environment, primary production, and the population responses of Adélie penguins. The project will also further the NSF goals of making scientific discoveries available to the general public and of training new generations of scientists. The results of this project can be used to illustrate intuitively to the general public the complex interactions between ice, ocean, pelagic food web and top predators. This project also offers an excellent platform to demonstrate the process of climate-change science - how scientists simulate climate change scenarios and interpret model results. This project supports the training of undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of polar oceanography, plankton and seabird ecology, coupled physical-biological modeling and mathematical ecology. The results will be broadly disseminated to the general oceanographic research community through scientific workshops, conferences and peer-reviewed journal articles, and to undergraduate and graduate education communities, K-12 schools and organizations, and the interested public through web-based servers using existing infrastructure at the investigators' institutions. The key question to be addressed in this project is how climate impacts the timing of periodic biological events (phenology) and how interannual variation in this periodic forcing influences the abundance of penguins in the Antarctic. The focus will be on the timing of ice algae and phytoplankton blooms because the high seasonality of sea ice and associated pulsed primary productivity are major drivers of the Antarctic food web. This study will also examine the responses of Adélie penguins to changes in sea ice dynamics and ice algae-phytoplankton phenology. Adélie penguins, like many other Antarctic seabirds, are long-lived, upper trophic-level predators that integrate the effects of sea ice on the food web at regional scales, and thus serve as a reliable biological indicator of environmental changes. The proposed approach is designed to accommodate the limits of measuring and modeling the intermediate trophic levels between phytoplankton and penguins (e.g., zooplankton and fish) at the pan-Antarctic scale, which are important but latent variables in the Southern Ocean food web. Through the use of remotely sensed and in situ data, along with state of the art statistical approaches (e.g. wavelet analysis) and numerical modeling, this highly interdisciplinary study will advance our understanding of polar ecosystems and improve the projection of future climate change scenarios.

研究的目的是了解与气候相关的雪和冰的变化如何影响南极的捕食者种群，使用阿德利企鹅作为焦点物种，因为它是南大洋“哨兵”物种的悠久历史以及监测其丰富性，分布和育种生物学的长期研究计划的数量。了解控制捕食者种群动态的环境因素对于在未来的气候变化情景下投射人口状况以及为南极生态系统设计更好的保护策略至关重要。首次将合并和分析来自整个南极的Adélie企鹅网站网络的数据集，重点关注冰环境，初级生产以及阿德利企鹅的人口反应之间的联系。该项目还将进一步为公众提供科学发现和培训新一代科学家的目标。该项目的结果可用于向普通公众展示ICE，Ocean，Pelagic Food Web和顶级捕食者之间的复杂相互作用。该项目还提供了一个出色的平台来展示气候变化科学的过程 - 科学家如何模拟气候变化方案和解释模型结果。该项目支持极地海洋学，浮游生物和海鸟生态学，耦合的物理生物学建模和数学生态学领域的本科和研究生的培训。该结果将通过科学研讨会，会议和同行评审的期刊文章以及本科和研究生教育社区，K-12学校和组织以及有趣的公众通过研究人员机构的现有基础架构通过基于Web的公众服务器以及有趣的公共服务器，将结果广泛传播到一般海洋学研究界。该项目要解决的关键问题是气候如何影响周期性生物事件的时机（物候）以及这种定期强迫中的年际变化如何影响南极企鹅的抽象。重点将放在冰藻和浮游植物血液的时机上，因为海冰和相关的脉冲主要生产力的高季节性是南极食品网的主要驱动力。这项研究还将研究阿德利企鹅对改变海冰动力学和冰藻 - 闪兰克顿候物候的反应。与许多其他南极海鸟一样，阿德利企鹅是长期寿命的上三光捕食者，可以在区域尺度上整合海冰对食物网的影响，因此可以作为环境变化的可靠生物学指标。所提出的方法旨在适应浮游植物和企鹅（例如，浮游动物和鱼类）之间在泛抗性尺度上测量和建模中间营养水平的局限性，这在南部海洋食品网络中很重要，但潜在变量很重要。通过使用远程感知和原位数据，以及最先进的方法（例如小波分析）和数值建模，这项高度跨学科的研究将提高我们对极地生态系统的理解，并改善对未来气候变化情景的投影。