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Publications (295)
The Kuroshio intrusion from the Luzon Strait significantly affects ecosystems in the South China Sea (SCS), especially during the Northeast Monsoon, a time when field observations are notably sparse and where vertical mixing induced by strong winds can obscure the effects of the Kuroshio intrusion. In this study, we address these gaps by reanalyzin...
Silin Ni Min Xu Du Moge- [...]
Shuh-JI Kao
Plain Language Summary
Grazing by zooplankton exerts important control on microbes in the aquatic systems. Ammonia oxidizers (AO) are chemoautotrophic microorganisms that utilize most of their substrate as a source of energy rather than biomass (low biomass yield but high transformation efficiency) and mediate nitrification, a critical process in b...
The anticyclonic eddies (ACEs) shed from the Kuroshio intrusion often interact with internal waves (IWs). Those interactions are complex but play an important role in the biogeochemical effects in the northern South China Sea (SCS). However, previous studies on these interactions have mainly focused on physical processes, while biological responses...
Understanding the driving mechanism of phytoplankton dynamics is key to forecasting future changes in the ocean. Here, we report an apparent “trapezoidal” relationship between chlorophyll concentrations (Chl) and surface photosynthetically available radiation (PAR(0)) at the center of the South Pacific Gyre (cSPG) based on 18 years of MODIS Aqua me...
The impact of climate warming on soil microbial communities can significantly influence the global carbon cycle. Coastal wetlands, in particular, are susceptible to changes in soil microbial community structure due to climate warming and the presence of invasive plant species. However, there is limited knowledge about how native and invasive plant...
Plain Language Summary
Phytoplankton growth requires both light and nutrients. In most open oceans, the vertical distribution of the chlorophyll‐a concentration generally is a maximum at a subsurface depth because of nutrient depletion in surface waters and inadequate light at depth. We took advantage of the continuous observations from autonomous...
Plain Language Summary
Coastal zones include sites where river water meets seawater (river plumes) and where deep, nutrient‐rich seawater rises to the surface (upwelling). These regions are generally characterized by higher concentrations of nutrients and microscopic plants (phytoplankton) than are found in the open ocean. We are still learning the...
The growth and death of phytoplankton are two key processes that affect structure and function of marine ecosystem. However, current understanding is elaborated from the perspective of growth, and relatively little is known about the environment-driven death of phytoplankton. Our study is aimed to elucidate the differences in group-specific proport...
Aims
Coastal salt marshes are productive ecosystems that are highly efficient carbon sinks, but there is uncertainty regarding the interactions among climate warming, plant species, and tidal restriction on C cycling.
Methods
Open-top chambers (OTCs) were deployed at two coastal wetlands in Yancheng, China, where native Phragmites australis (Phrag...
Subtropical gyres cover 26%–29% of the world's surface ocean and are conventionally regarded as ocean deserts due to their permanent stratification, depleted surface nutrients, and low biological productivity. Despite tremendous advances over the past three decades, particularly through the Hawaii Ocean Time‐series and the Bermuda Atlantic Time‐ser...
Recent research has shown that jellyfish blooms occur more frequently near nuclear power plants (NPPs), and a relationship between thermal discharges from the NPPs and the blooms has been hypothesized. There is, however, no direct evidence that links the thermal discharges with jellyfish blooms. In this study, we conducted three cruises (Pre-Bloom,...
Exploring the responses of microbial communities and their functions to marine frontal systems are the foci of marine ecologists. However, most of the existing studies have focused on only microbial communities or their functions. The relationships between microbial communities and their functions across coastal fronts therefore remain unclear. Her...
Studies of heavy metal pollution are essential for the protection of coastal environments. In this study, positive matrix factorization (PMF) and a GeoDetector model were used to evaluate the sources of heavy metal contamination and associated ecological risks along the Yancheng Coastal Wetland. The distribution of heavy metals was shown to be grea...
To reconstruct the Holocene vegetation history from Liaohe Delta in northeast (NE) China, a high-resolution palynological study on a well-dated sediment core ZK2 was conducted. The pollen record of ZK2 suggests that during the early Holocene, the regional vegetation in the plain was meadow-dominated by Artemisia. And forest with cool-temperate coni...
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most important drivers of interannual variations of marine ecosystems, especially monsoonal ecosystems. The channel effect in a strait amplifies the impact of monsoons and may be an ideal area to study ecosystem responses to ENSO events. Previous studies have shown that physical processes in the...
The marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus was grown in a continuous culture system to study the interactive effects of temperature, irradiance, nutrient limitation, and the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) on its growth and physiological characteristics. Cells were grown on a 14:10 h light:dark cycle at all combinations of low and high irradi...
China has a wetland area of 53.42 million hectares, the fourth largest in the world; it includes all types of wetlands defined by the Ramsar Convention and has a carbon sink capacity of more than 1.71 million metric tons per year. Inland wetlands in China are mainly distributed in 10 major catchments, among which the Yellow River, the Yangtze River...
Plain Language Summary
Picophytoplankton are tiny, single‐celled photosynthetic organisms that contribute to almost all primary production in the vast euphotic zones of the oligotrophic ocean. Understanding their roles in that environment is critical but challenging, mainly because of their minuscule size and the complexity of microbial processes a...
The fraction of soil protein extracted by autoclaving soil (AESP) has emerged as a potential indicator of available organic nitrogen (N), aggregate stability, and soil carbon (C) storage potential. Estimates of AESP are often based on colorimetric assays—primarily the Bradford assay—yet the results of these assays can be confounded by interference...
The rise of atmospheric pCO2 has created a number of problems for marine ecosystem. In this study, we initially quantified the effects of elevated pCO2 on the group-specific mortality of phytoplankton in a natural community based on the results of mesocosm experiments. Diatoms dominated the phytoplankton community, and the concentration of chloroph...
Marine microbiota are critical components of global biogeochemical cycles. However, the biogeographic patterns and ecological processes that structure them remain poorly understood, especially in the oligotrophic ocean. In this study, we used high-throughput sequencing of 16S and 18S rRNA genes to investigate the distribution patterns of bacterial...
Knowledge of the relationship between net primary production (NPP) and export production (EP) in the ocean is required to estimate how the ocean’s biological pump is likely to respond to climate change effects. Here, we show with a theoretical food web model that the relationship between NPP and EP is obscured by the following phenomena: (1) food w...
Coastal marshes have among the highest rates of soil carbon accumulation of any ecosystem on Earth, yet they are increasingly being lost due to high rates of relative sea-level rise, changes to their hydrology, and other natural and anthropogenic factors. To mitigate some of this wetland loss, restoration strategies in Louisiana have been focused o...
Five 20–30 m long boreholes recovered from the modern Yellow River Delta (MYRD) were analyzed for sedimentary characteristics, grain sizes, foraminiferal species, and ages determined by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) 14 C, bulk density, and carbon content to document the variation of carbon sequestration in several distinct wetlands and aquati...
Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton initiate material cycling and the flow of energy through marine ecosystems. The structure of marine ecosystems is sensitive to the size of primary producers, and size-specific photosynthesis-irradiance (P-I) parameters are required for modeling the size-specific primary production. We defined a phytoplankton ty...
Phytoplankton growth rates and zooplankton grazing rates were estimated on 16 occasions over a period of 17 months in University Lake, a highly eutrophic lake on the campus of Louisiana State University. Phytoplankton growth rates and chlorophyll a concentrations averaged 1.0 ± 0.2 d−1 and 240 ± 120 mg m−3, respectively. Chlorophyll a concentration...
The hydromedusa Blackfordia virginica is an invasive species that has disrupted coastal marine food webs throughout the world. Here, we report the response of plankton community to B. virginica blooms in a subtropical lagoon in China. Chlorophyll-a concentrations increased after the peak of B. virginica abundance, which was coincident with high con...
Bacteria play a pivotal role in shaping ecosystems and contributing to elemental cycling and energy flow in the oceans. However, few studies have focused on bacteria at a trans-basin scale, and studies across the subtropical Northwest Pacific Ocean (NWPO), one of the largest biomes on Earth, have been especially lacking. Although the recently devel...
Phytoplankton size classes (PSCs) are among the most important metrics of phytoplankton community structure and determinants of aquatic food web functionality. Advanced satellite algorithms can be used to estimate PSCs and to integrate the results of biogeochemical research and theoretical studies. Analysis of an extensive dataset of pigment concen...
Upwelling and internal waves are known to affect the physical and chemical characteristics of marine ecosystems, yet the processes and mechanisms by which internal waves influence phytoplankton biomass and community composition in upwelling regions are still unclear. In this study, a 72-h time series of observations was conducted in an upwelling sy...
There has been much debate about the external drivers that affect the decomposition of soil organic matter (SOM). Particularly, the feedback mechanisms between SOM and mineral weathering are poorly understood. We used the cotton strip assay combined with measurements of water table, pore water salinity, and soil properties along a landscape-scale g...
The marine diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana was grown in continuous culture systems to study the interactive effects of temperature, irradiance, nutrient limitation, and the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) on its growth and physiological characteristics. The cells were able to grow at all combinations of low and high irradiance (50 and 300 µmol photo...
The Taiwan Strait (TWS), connecting the South China Sea and the East China Sea, is affected by complex land-sea interactions as well as by human activities on both sides of the Strait. In such a subtropical strait ecosystem, phytoplankton communities exhibit spatiotemporal variations that are complex and dynamic compared with those of classical coa...
The Luanhe Fan-Delta (LFD) is one of the most important coastal deltas in North China. Numerous investigations on the late Quaternary evolution of this fan-delta system have been implemented during the 1980s. However, few detailed sedimentologic studies have been undertaken. Based on comprehensive analysis of sedimentary facies, grain size, microfo...
Nutrient dynamics and its influence on the distribution of chlorophyll-a in the upwelling area of the Changjiang (Yangtze) River estuary were investigated in the spring (May) and summer (August) of 2004. The spring upwelling was apparent in the region of 122°20′–123°00′ E, 31°00′–32°00′ N and was associated with low temperature (16–21 °C), high sal...
To evaluate the influences of the Kuroshio Current intrusion on the biogeochemistry of the northern South China Sea (NSCS), we conducted field observations of the responses of microbial metabolism to the intrusions of the Kuroshio Current into the NSCS. We used an isopycnal mixing model to quantitatively assess the extent of the Kuroshio intrusion...
Predicting changes of phytoplankton communities in response to global warming is one of the challenges of ecological forecasting. One of the constraints is the paucity of general principles applicable to community ecology. Based on a synecological analysis of a decadal-scale database, we created a niche habitat classification scheme relating nine p...
To elucidate the mechanisms responsible for pollen and spore transportation and deposition in the Bohai Sea, fully covered seafloor-surface sediment samples were collected for palynological and grain size analysis. The results reveal that the pollen and spore concentrations were higher in the head of Liaodong Bay and in the muddy area of the Bohai...
We used field observations (mapping and time-series observations) and satellite data to investigate the changes of environmental factors and plankton community structure during four pulsed upwelling events in the southern Taiwan Strait (STWS) during August 2004 and July 2005. Based on the surface temperature, salinity, and concentrations of nitrate...
Phytoplankton chlorophyll a (Chla), primary production (PP), and nutrient uptake rates are fundamental and important parameters in marine biogeochemical studies. However, the relationships between them are associated with much uncertainty that reflects gaps in basic understanding of ecosystem dynamic. In this study, we simultaneously measured PP an...
Discharges of domestic sewage, industrial wastewater, and runoff of agricultural fertilizer have caused severe nutrient pollution and eutrophication in many estuaries and coastal areas around the world, especially in the Bohai Sea of China and its inner bay, Liaodong Bay. Subsequent to studies of this bay during the summer of 2013, an investigation...
While SAR11 bacteria contribute a significant fraction to the total picoplankton biomass in the ocean and likely are major players in organic C and nutrient cycling, the cellular characteristics and metabolic features of most lineages have either only been hypothesized from genomes or otherwise not measured in controlled laboratory experimentation....
We analyzed net primary production (NPP) and export production rates measured in the Southern Ocean (SO) and at Station ALOHA (22° 45′N, 158° 00′W) and discovered that in both cases there was a highly significant negative correlation between NPP and the ratio of export production to NPP (i.e., the export ratio). We show that in both cases this nega...
The major biogeochemical cycles of marine ecosystems are driven by solar energy. Energy that is initially captured through photosynthesis is transformed and transported to great ocean depths via complex, yet poorly understood, energy flow networks. Herein we show that the chemical composition and specific energy (Joules per unit mass or organic car...
Objective: To measure marine primary productivity as precisely as possible and solve the issues existed in current devices, a new design based on the classical oxygen light-dark bottle methodology and integrated with new compact models of ‘simulated’ in situ (SIS) incubations was developed in this study, and it worked well in efficiently supporting...
Ample historical evidence has demonstrated the neurotoxicity of organic Hg. However, several studies have suggested that Se effectively sequesters MeHg. The affinity of Hg is up to ≈10⁶ times higher for Se molecules than for comparable sulfur molecules, most of which are components of brain enzymes. The neurotoxicity of MeHg is associated with its...
Concentrations of arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), mercury (Hg), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn), grain sizes, and concentrations of organic carbon (Corg) were measured in 323 river sediment samples from the Pearl River Delta (PRD). Results showed that the heavy metal concentrations in the sediments ranged from 1.6–93 mg/kg for As,...
Background
Organic carbon sources have been reported to simultaneously increase the growth and lipid accumulation in microalgae. However, there have been no studies of the mixotrophic growth of Porphyridium purpureum in organic carbon media. In this study, three organic carbon sources, glucose, sodium acetate, and glycerol were used as substrates f...
Tom Bannister (1930–2018) was an extraordinary person and a remarkably productive scientist. He began his career studying the basics of photochemistry, biophysics, and biology of photosynthetic pigments and later moved on to primary production of algae. His publications on modeling of primary production rates in aquatic systems are among the most w...
We examined response of phytoplankton total chlorophyll a (TChl a) and community composition to three coherent anticyclonic eddies (ACEs) observed during a cruise to the northern South China Sea on 28 July to 7 August 2007. Photosynthetic pigments were measured to estimate the contribution of nine phytoplankton groups to TChl a. Although the water...
The role of protists and bacteriophages in bacterial predation in the microbial food web has been well studied. There is mounting evidence that Bdellovibrio and like organisms (BALOs) also contribute to bacterial mortality and, in some cases, more so than bacteriophages. A full understanding of the ecologic function of the microbial food web requir...
The various photosynthetic apparatus and light utilization strategies of phytoplankton are among the critical factors that regulate the distribution of phytoplankton and primary productivity in the ocean. Active chlorophyll fluorescence has been a powerful technique for assessing the nutritional status of phytoplankton by studying the dynamics of p...
Sinking particles are mainly composed of phytoplankton cells and zooplankton fecal pellets, but the proportions of these sources contribute to the overall particulate organic carbon (POC) flux are highly variable temporally and spatially. Here, we report for the first time simultaneous estimates of the POC fluxes from phytoplankton cells and zoopla...
An excavation has revealed in Hochung, in the Sai Kung area of Hong Kong, which mainly deposited during the Middle to Late Neolithic period. Base on pollen and phytolith analysis, and combine with pervious published report reconstructed the paleoenvironmental changes around the archeological site. Results show that the settings around the Hochung s...
A remarkable bloom of phytoplankton occurred in the southeast sector (SE) of Kaneohe Bay from 1987 through 1989. During the bloom, concentrations of chlorophyll a at the former site of the Kaneohe municipal wastewater treatment plant outfall averaged a little more than 2 mg m⁻³ for a period of 40 months. The increase of chl a was accompanied by a r...
A field study was carried out during the summer of 2013 in Liaodong Bay, China to determine the dynamics of the phytoplankton in the bay and the extent to which primary production in the bay was constrained by environmental factors. There was little or no evidence of limitation of phytoplankton production by nutrient concentrations at any of the sa...
The carbon sequestration rate (CSR) in deltaic wetlands is associated with the nutrient balance, sediment (soil) accretion rate (SAR) and geological and climatic conditions. To explore the relationships between these factors, micronutrients; C, N, and P concentrations; and ages determined using either paleosols or radiometric dating with ²¹⁰Pb were...
The Liaohe Delta in Northeast China is one of the ecologically important estuarine deltas in China. It has been formed via the accumulation of sediment discharged by four rivers in the Liaohe Plain that enter Liaodong Bay. Twenty-seven 30–40 m long cores recovered from the Liaohe Plain and Liaodong Bay were analyzed for sedimentary characteristics,...
Temperature change and eutrophication are known to affect phytoplankton communities, but relatively little is known about the effects of interactions between simultaneous changes of temperature and nutrient loading in coastal ecosystems. Here we show that such interaction is key in driving diatom-dinoflagellate dynamics in the East China Sea. Diato...
University Lake, a shallow, artificial, urban lake adjacent to the campus of Louisiana State University, has a long history of water quality problems, including algal blooms, fish kills, and high concentrations of fecal indicator bacteria. Periodic dredging of the lake is necessary to prevent its return to swampland. This study was undertaken to el...
Liaodong Bay, a semi-enclosed bay located in northeastern China, is impacted by the discharges of five rivers. We analyzed 100 surface sediment samples from the Shallow Sea Wetland of Liaodong Bay for grain size and concentrations of organic carbon (Corg) and heavy metals. The ranges of the heavy metal concentrations were 2.32–17 μg/g (As), 0.025–1...