Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 03 Issue 01

View Issue TOC
Volume 03, No. 1
Pages 18 - 22

OpenAccess

Measurement of Photosynthetic Response to Euphotic Zone Physical Forcing

By Gary J. Kirkpatrick , Thomas B. Curtin, Daniel Kamykowski , Michael D. Feezor, Mickey D. Sartin, and Robert E. Reed  
Jump to
Citation Copyright & Usage
First Paragraph

The influence of vertical water motion on the photosynthetic response of phytoplankton entrained in the upper mixed layer of the ocean is an aspect of biological oceanography that has received considerable interest for a number of years. Thorough reviews of phytoplankton response parameters, environmental variables, and the space and time scales of interest to phytoplankton ecology can be found in Harris (1980, 1984), Richardson et al. (1983), Denman and Gargett (1983), Falkowski (1984), Legendre and Demers (1984) and Harding et al. (1987). Light, temperature and nutrients are the principal environmental variables eliciting responses that ultimately are biochemically based but are manifested in changes to phytoplankton photosynthetic rates, behavior and growth. These biological responses, resulting from physical forcing, consist of nonlinear, multivariate relations on broad time and space scales involving complications such as time delays, hysteresis and filtering, to name a few. The discipline of establishing an understanding of this complex biophysical system was termed “dynamic biological oceanography” by Legendre and Demers (1984) to emphasize the non-steady-state nature of the problem. Due to the primary position that the phytoplankton occupy in the cycle of life in the ocean and the importance of the oceans to the rest of the earth, considerable effort has been and will continue to be dedicated to investigating this system.

Citation

Kirkpatrick, G.J., T.B. Curtin, D. Kamykowski, MD. Feezor, M.D. Sartin, and R.E. Reed. 1990. Measurement of photosynthetic response to euphotic zone physical forcing. Oceanography 3(1):18–22, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1990.16.

Copyright & Usage

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.