Planktonic food web dynamics on the Northeast US Shelf

This project develops planktonic ecosystem models for the Northeast US Shelf to understand plankton ecology and support ecosystem management in the region. The central questions of this work are:

• What is the spatial and temporal variability in planktonic community structure and dynamics on the Northeast US shelf and how is it changing?

• How is plankton community structure and dynamics related to the productivity of critical fish and whale populations in the region?

This work is in collaboration between WHOI and MIT scientists. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Simons Foundation Computational Biogeochemical Modeling of Marine Ecosystems (CBIOMES) and WHOI. 

Environmental drivers of fish stock recruitment

This project is developing new models of environmentally-driven recruitment processes in exploited fish populations, both in general and applied to stocks in the Northeast US. The central questions of this work are:

• Can state space stock assessment methods effectively model the environmental drivers of recruitment? 

• What is the impact of Gulf Stream eddies on fisheries recruitment on Georges Bank?

This work is in collaboration with the NOAA Research Track Working Group on State Space Models. We gratefully acknowledge funding from WHOI. 

Timescales of variability in marine phytoplankton dynamics

This project was focused on the response of phytoplankton growth to environmental variability on hourly to seasonal timescales. We examined the seasonality of chlorophyll-to-carbon ratios in the North Pacific. We developed a model for extreme phytoplankton in the North Atlantic using statistical extreme value theory. And we are currently finishing a paper on how predictability of photosynthesis-irradiance varies across daily to annual timescales.

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Marine Microbial Ecology.