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冰雪变化如何影响南极捕食者种群，利用阿德利企鹅作为焦点物种，因为它作为南大洋“哨兵”物种的悠久历史和长期存在的数量。监测其丰度、分布和繁殖生物学的定期研究计划。了解控制捕食者种群动态的环境因素对于预测未来气候变化情景下的种群状况以及首次为南极生态系统设计更好的保护策略至关重要。 ,来自整个南极洲阿德利企鹅观测点网络的数据集将被合并和分析，重点是冰环境、初级生产和阿德利企鹅种群反应之间的联系。该项目还将进一步推进 NSF 的目标。向公众提供科学发现并培训新一代科学家 该项目的结果可用于向公众直观地说明冰、海洋、远洋食物网和顶层之间的复杂相互作用。该项目还提供了一个很好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情景并解释模型结果。该项目支持极地海洋学、浮游生物和海鸟领域的本科生和研究生的培训。研究结果将通过科学研讨会、会议和同行评审的期刊文章广泛传播给整个海洋学研究界，以及本科生和研究生教育界、K-12 学校和组织。和有兴趣的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（物候）的时间以及这种周期性强迫的年际变化如何影响企鹅的丰度。重点将放在冰藻和浮游植物繁殖的时间上，因为海冰的高季节性和相关的初级生产力是南极食物网的主要驱动因素。阿德利企鹅与海冰动态和冰藻-浮游植物物候学的变化有关，像许多其他南极海鸟一样，阿德利企鹅是长寿的上层营养级捕食者，在区域范围内整合了海冰对食物网的影响，从而作为环境变化的可靠生物指标。所提出的方法旨在适应测量和模拟浮游植物和企鹅之间的中间营养水平的限制。通过使用遥感和现场数据以及最先进的统计方法（例如小波分析），泛南极范围内的浮游动物和鱼类）是南大洋食物网中重要但潜在的变量。 ）和数值模拟，这项高度跨学科的研究将增进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预测。