Ocean Systems Ecology Lab

Modeling the impact of offshore wind installations on the ocean circulation and biological productivity of the Northeast US Shelf

This project is focused on developing new planktonic ecosystem models for the Northeast US Shelf with application to modeling potential impacts of planned offshore wind farm installations. The main questions are:

How will wind farm installations alter physical mixing and nutrient supply dynamics on the US Northeast Shelf?
How will changes in nutrient supply dynamics impact primary and secondary productivity?

We thank NOAA and BOEM for funding.

Ocean Vital Signs Network: the ecology of carbon sequestration

This project is part of the broader Ocean Vital Signs Network (OVSN) project at WHOI which is developing a basin-scale sensor network to observe and model the carbon cycle of the Northwest Atlantic. The main questions are:

How do plankton community dynamics control the export of organic matter from the surface ocean?
How do heterotrophic plankton community dynamics control the respiration of organic matter at depth?

We thank the WHOI OVSN project for funding.

Bayesian machine learning of microbial community dynamics

This project seeks to develop and apply computational methods to infer microbial community dynamics from next-generation time series observations, specifically multi-'omics and micro-fluidic imagery paired with biogeochemisty. The main questions are:

Can we use microbial abundance time series to infer trophic and non-trophic interactions within microbial communities?
How do microbial communities assemble and re-organize under environmental perturbations?

We thank the Simons Foundation for funding.

Plankton community structure and dynamics in the US Northeast Large Marine Ecosystem

This project develops new planktonic ecosystem models for the Northeast US Shelf to understand fundamental ecological processes occurring in the region. The main question is:

What is the structure and dynamics of the marine planktonic ecosystem on the US Northeast Shelf?

We thank the Simons Foundation and WHOI for funding.

Previous research projects

Environmental drivers of fish stock recruitment on the US Northeast shelf

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

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

We thank WHOI for funding.

Modeling environmentally-driven stock recruitment within next-generation state space fisheries stock assessment models

This project was part of the NOAA Research Track Working Group on Applying State Space Methods in Fisheries Stock Assessment, led out of the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Center. The work conducted extensive simulation testing of newly developed stock assessment models with the goal of establishing the conditions under which environmental covariates on stock recruitment can improve stock assessment performance.

We thank WHOI for funding.

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 thank the Simons Foundation for funding.