Anya M. Waite

University of Western Australia | UWA · School of Environmental Systems Engineering

Large amounts of atmospheric carbon can be exported and retained in the deep sea on millennial time scales, buffering global warming. However, while the Barents Sea is one of the most biologically productive areas of the Arctic Ocean, carbon retention times were thought to be short. Here we present observations, complemented by numerical model simu...

Zooplankton plays a major role in ocean food webs and biogeochemical cycles, and provides major ecosystem services as a main driver of the biological carbon pump and in sustaining fish communities. Zooplankton is also sensitive to its environment and reacts to its changes. To better understand the importance of zooplankton, and to inform prognostic...

Measuring plankton and associated variables as part of ocean time-series stations has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of ocean biology and ecology and their ties to ocean biogeochemistry. It will open temporal scales (e.g., resolving diel cycles) not typically sampled as a function of depth. In this review we motivate the addition...

Plankton imaging systems supported by automated classification and analysis have improved ecologists' ability to observe aquatic ecosystems. Today, we are on the cusp of reliably tracking plankton populations with a suite of lab‐based and in situ tools, collecting imaging data at unprecedentedly fine spatial and temporal scales. But these data have...

Export into the deep sea can store significant amounts of atmospheric carbon (C) on millennial time scales, buffering global warming1,2. The Barents Sea is one of the most biologically productive areas of the Arctic Ocean3,4 but C retention times there were thought to be short5. Here we show that dense bottom water formation and transport over the...

The eastern Indian Ocean is among the most oligotrophic regions in the world and has been described as an ocean desert. Limited information exists on microbial community profiles from marker gene data, and an open question in this system is how energy is transported from the base of the food web to higher trophic levels. Here we show that, along a...

Marine particles of different nature are found throughout the global Ocean. The term "marine particles" describes detritus aggregates, fecal pellets, but also bacterio-, phyto-, zooplankton and nekton. Here we present a global particle size distribution dataset obtained with several Underwater Vision Profiler 5 (UVP5) camera systems. Overall, withi...

Understanding and sustainably managing complex environments such as marine ecosystems benefits from an integrated approach to ensure that information about all relevant components and their interactions at multiple and nested spatiotemporal scales are considered. This information is based on a wide range of ocean observations using different system...

Autonomous and cabled platforms are revolutionizing our understanding of ocean systems by providing 4D monitoring of the water column, thus going beyond the reach of ship‐based surveys and increasing the depth of remotely sensed observations. However, very few commercially available sensors for such platforms are capable of monitoring large particu...

The ocean moderates the world’s climate through absorption of heat and carbon, but how much carbon the ocean will continue to absorb remains unknown. The North Atlantic Ocean west (Baffin Bay/Labrador Sea) and east (Fram Strait/Greenland Sea) of Greenland features the most intense absorption of anthropogenic carbon globally; the biological carbon p...

Arctic Ocean sea ice cover is shrinking due to warming. Long-term sediment trap data shows higher export efficiency of particulate organic carbon in regions with seasonal sea ice compared to regions without sea ice. To investigate this sea-ice enhanced export, we compared how different early summer phytoplankton communities in seasonally ice-free a...

In the marine realm, microorganisms are responsible for the bulk of primary production, thereby sustaining marine life across all trophic levels. Longhurst provinces have distinct microbial fingerprints; however, little is known about how microbial diversity and primary productivity change at finer spatial scales. Here, we sampled the Atlantic Ocea...

Biogeochemical cycling of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in the ocean depends on both the composition and activity of underlying biological communities and on abiotic factors. The Southern Ocean is encircled by a series of strong currents and fronts, providing a barrier to microbial dispersion into adjacent oligotrophic gyres. Our study region straddl...

The organic carbon produced in the ocean's surface by phytoplankton is either passed through the food web or exported to the ocean interior as marine snow. The rate and efficiency of such vertical export strongly depend on the size, structure and shape of individual particles, but apart from size, other morphological properties are still not quanti...

Global oceanographic monitoring initiatives originally measured abiotic essential ocean variables but are currently incorporating biological and metagenomic sampling programs. There is, however, a large knowledge gap on how to infer bacterial functions, the information sought by biogeochemists, ecologists, and modelers, from the bacterial taxonomic...

Biogeochemical cycling of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in the ocean depends on both the composition and activity of underlying biological communities and on abiotic factors. The Southern Ocean is encircled by a series of strong currents and fronts, providing a barrier to microbial dispersion into adjacent oligotrophic gyres. Our study region straddl...

This perspective outlines how authors of ocean methods, guides, and standards can harmonize their work across the scientific community. We reflect on how documentation practices can be linked to modern information technologies to improve discoverability, interlinkages, and thus the evolution of distributed methods into common best practices within...

Global oceanographic monitoring initiatives started by measuring abiotic essential ocean variables but are currently incorporating biological and metagenomic sampling. There is, however, a large gap between the taxonomic information produced by bacterial genomic analyses and information on bacterial functions, which is sought by biogeochemists, eco...

Nitrogen (N) is an essential element for life and controls the magnitude of primary productivity in the ocean. In order to describe the microorganisms that catalyze N transformations in surface waters in the South Pacific Ocean, we collected high-resolution biotic and abiotic data along a 7000 km transect, from the Antarctic ice edge to the equator...

In this document, we provide details on how to best use the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS) templates, thus allowing greater discovery, machine readability, sharing and understandability of methods and best practices (Buttigieg et al. 2019). This document clarifies how to optimally populate the different sections of an OBPS template. We describe...

Nutrient-rich water upwells offshore of northwest Africa and is subsequently advected westwards. There it forms eddies and filaments with a rich spatial structure of physical and biological/biogeochemical properties. Here we present a high-resolution (2.5 km) section through upwelling filaments and an eddy obtained in May 2018 with a TRIAXUS towed...

Optical particle measurements are emerging as an important technique for understanding the ocean carbon cycle, including contributions to estimates of their downward flux, which sequesters carbon dioxide (CO2) in the deep sea. Optical instruments can be used from ships or installed on autonomous platforms, delivering much greater spatial and tempor...

Abstract. Nutrient rich water upwells offshore of Northwest Africa and is subsequently advected westwards. There it forms eddies and filaments with a rich spatial structure of physical and biological/biogeochemical properties. Here we present a high resolution (2.5 km) section through upwelling filaments and an eddy obtained in May 2018 with a Tria...

Ongoing climate change is impacting the earth’s sensitive ecosystems such as those in the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic region is experiencing a rapid increase in sea surface temperature and CO2 levels as well as changes in salinity due to loss of sea ice. Phytoplankton, forming the base of the food web, are highly sensitive to environmental change, and...

Anticyclonic (warm‐core) mesoscale eddies (WCEs) in the Eastern Indian Ocean carry higher surface chlorophyll signatures than cyclonic (cold‐core) eddies (CCEs). Paradoxically, WCEs host rock lobster larvae (phyllosomas) with lower lipid stores and protein reserves than phyllosomas in CCEs, suggesting a poorer nutritional status. We assess primary...

In this paper we review the technologies available to make globally quantitative observations of particles in general-and plankton in particular-in the world oceans, and for sizes varying from sub-microns to centimeters. Some of these technologies have been available for years while others have only recently emerged. Use of these technologies is cr...

Significance High-resolution data covering marine microbes and microeukaryotes are sparse, even though these organisms control global biogeochemical cycles. Here we present a dataset describing the microbial pro- and eukaryotic diversity along a 7,000-km transect from the Antarctic ice edge to the equator in the South Pacific Ocean. We show that (...

Design Type(s) data integration objective • database creation objective Measurement Type(s) chlorophyll a Technology Type(s) high performance liquid chromotography assay • fluorometry • spectrophotometry Factor Type(s) geographic location Sample Characteristic(s) phytoplankton • Adelaide • Australia • Bunbury • City of Coffs Harbour • Coorong Lagoo...

We investigated the bacterial community structure in surface waters along a 2500 km transect in the eastern Indian Ocean. Using high throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene, we measured a significant latitudinal increase in bacterial richness from 800 to 1400 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) (42% increase; r2 = 0.65; p < 0.001) from the tropic...

There have been many individual phytoplankton datasets collected across Australia since the mid 1900s, but most are unavailable to the research community. We have searched archives, contacted researchers,and scanned the primary and grey literature to collate 3,621,847 records of marine phytoplankton species from Australian waters from 1844 to the p...

Scientific Data 3:160043 doi: 10.1038/sdata.2016.43 (2016); Published 21 Jun 2016; Updated 6 Dec 2016 A series of errors in our database were brought to our attention by readers, and have been corrected in an updated version of this database, which is accessible via the AODN at the following link: https://portal.aodn.

Mesoscale eddies in the ocean strongly impact the distribution of planktonic particles, mediating carbon fluxes over ~1/3 of the world ocean. However, mechanisms controlling particle transport through eddies are complex and challenging to measure in situ. Here we show the subsurface distribution of eddy particles funnelled into a wine-glass shape d...

There have been many individual phytoplankton datasets collected across Australia since the mid 1900s, but most are unavailable to the research community. We have searched archives, contacted researchers, and scanned the primary and grey literature to collate 3,621,847 records of marine phytoplankton species from Australian waters from 1844 to the...

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a powerful greenhouse gas and a key catalyst of stratospheric ozone depletion. Yet, little data exist about the sink and source terms of the production and reduction of N2O outside the well-known oxygen minimum zones (OMZ). Here we show the presence of functional marker genes for the reduction of N2O in the last step of the d...

Dissolved oxygen vs nitrite (NO2_) concentrations in the south-eastern Indian Ocean. See Fig 1 for CTD stations. Note: Elevated NO2_ concentrations up to 0.3 μmol.L-1 in relative oxygenated surface waters. (TIF)

Metadata for microbial community data. (DOCX)

Mesoscale eddies may drive a significant component of cross-shelf transport important in the ecology of shelf ecosystems and adjacent boundary currents. The Leeuwin Current in the eastern Indian Ocean becomes unstable in the austral autumn triggering the formation of eddies. We hypothesized that eddy formation represented the major driver of cross-...

The strong La Niña of 2010–2011 provided an opportunity to investigate the ecological impacts of El Niño-Southern Oscillation on coastal plankton communities using the nine national reference stations around Australia. Based on remote sensing and across the entire Australian region 2011 (La Niña) was only modestly different from 2010 (El Niño) with...

Larvae of the western rock lobster (Panulirus cygnus) that occur in the south-east Indian Ocean offshore of Western Australia have been found to be in poorer nutritional condition in anticyclonic compared with cyclonic mesoscale eddies. The reason for this is unknown, but culture-based experiments have shown that diet composition and water temperat...

The effects of climate change on predatory fishes in deep shelf areas are difficult to predict because complex processes may govern food availability and temperature at depth. We characterised the net impact of recent environmental changes on hapuku (Polyprion oxygeneios), an apex predator found in continental slope habitats (>200 m depth) by using...

The contribution of planktonic diazotrophs to the overall N budget is a key unknown in the eastern Indian Ocean. Here we investigated the relationships between dissolved inorganic nutrients, phytoplankton pigment composition, microbial community structure, nitrogen fixation rates and the δ15N of fractionated zooplankton samples along the shelf brea...

During a zooplankton survey 350 km off the coast of Western Australia, we captured a large and robust zooid of a salp (Thetys vagina), to which six late stage larvae (phyllosomata) of the western rock lobster (Panulirus cygnus) were attached. High-throughput sequencing analyses of DNA extracts from midgut glands of the larvae confirmed that each ph...

The western rock lobster, Panulirus cygnus, provides Australia's most valuable wild caught fishery but, in recent years, there has been a dramatic decline in settlement of the post-larval phase into their natal coastal habitat. One hypothesis for this decline was that the oceanographic conditions no longer favour the survival, feeding and growth of...

The recent dramatic decline in settlement in the population of the spiny lobster, Panulirus cygnus, may be due to changes in the oceanographic processes that operate offshore of Western Australia. It has been suggested that this decline could be related to poor nutritional condition of the post-larvae, especially lipid which is accumulated in large...

Physical processes forced by alongshore wind and currents are known to strongly influence the biogeochemistry of coastal waters. Combining in-situ observations (moored platforms, hydrographic surveys) and satellite data (Sea Surface Wind and Sea Surface Height), we investigate the transient occurrence of wind-driven up/downwelling and current-drive...

Seasonal variations in coral health indices reflecting autotrophic activity (chlorophyll a and zooxanthellae density), metabolic rates (RNA/DNA ratio and protein) and energy storage (ratio of storage: structural lipids or lipid ratios) were examined for two dominant Acropora species [Acropora digitifera (AD) and Acropora spicifera (AS)] at Ningaloo...

We investigate the biogeochemistry of Low Dissolved Oxygen High Nitrate layers forming against the backdrop of several interleaving regional water masses in the Eastern Indian Ocean, off northwest Australia adjacent to Ningaloo Reef. These water masses, including the forming Leeuwin Current, have been shown directly to impact the ecological functio...

While there is no persistent upwelling along the West-Australian (WA) coastline, sporadic upwelling events have been documented primarily in summer. By analyzing comparatively the variability of both Ekman and geostrophic cross-shore transports over a seasonal cycle, we show that the situation is more contrasted. Based on a composite index computed...

Climate change is having major effects on the world’s marine ecosystems, and it is predicted that the severity of this problem will increase rapidly in coming years. For fishes, changes in temperature and current regimes may lead to shifts in distributions and changes in growth rates. Ultimately, this will have major implications for any fished spe...

Coral health indices are important components of the management assessments of coral reefs, providing insight into local variation in reef condition, as well as tools for comparisons between reefs and across various time scales. Understanding how such health indices vary in space and time is critical to their successful implementation as management...

Four-factorial PERMANOVA for health indices of two Acropora species. (DOCX)

Pair-wise correlations (p-values) for diel variations of A) effective quantum yield and B) relative electron transport rate. (DOCX)

Pair-wise correlations (p-values) for diel variations for RNA/DNA ratios. (DOCX)

The impact of physico-chemical factors on percent coral cover and coral health was examined on a spatial basis for two dominant Acropora species, A. digitifera and A. spicifera, at Ningaloo Reef (north-western Australia) in the southeast Indian Ocean. Coral health was investigated by measuring metabolic indices (RNA/DNA ratio and protein concentrat...