Julia Grosse

GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel · Division of Biological Oceanography

Amino acids (AA) and carbohydrates (CHO) are important components of the marine organic carbon cycle. Produced mainly by phytoplankton as part of the particulate organic carbon (POC) fraction, these compounds can be released into the outer medium where they become part of the dissolved organic carbon (DOC) pool and are rapidly taken up by heterotro...

Submesoscale eddies and fronts are important components of oceanic mixing and energy fluxes. These phenomena occur in the surface ocean for a period of several days, on scales between a few hundred meters and few tens of kilometers. Remote sensing and modeling suggest that eddies and fronts may influence marine ecosystem dynamics, but their limited...

The main source of marine organic carbon (OC) is autotrophic production, while heterotrophic degradation is its main sink. Increased anthropogenic CO2 release leads to ocean acidification and is expected to alter phytoplankton community composition, primary production rates and bacterial degradation processes in the coming decades with potential co...

Submesoscale eddies and fronts are recognized as important components of oceanic mixing and energy fluxes. These submesoscale phenomena occur in the surface ocean for a period of a few days on scales between several hundred meters and a few tens of kilometers. Remote sensing and modeling suggest that they may influence marine ecosystem dynamics, bu...

The Arctic Ocean is considerably affected by the consequences of global warming, including more extreme seasonal fluctuations in the physical environment. So far, little is known about seasonality in Arctic marine ecosystems in particular microbial dynamics and cycling of organic matter. The limited characterization can be partially attributed to l...

The Arctic Ocean plays a key role in regulating the global climate, while being highly sensitive to climate change. Temperature in the Arctic increases faster than the global average, causing a loss of multiyear sea-ice and affecting marine ecosystem structure and functioning. As a result, Arctic primary production and biogeochemical cycling are ch...

Coastal seas like the North Sea have been subject to major changes in nutrient inputs over the last decades, resulting in shifts of limiting nutrients for phytoplankton communities. Here we investigated the seasonal and spatial distribution and synthesis patterns of individual amino acids and distinct fatty acid groups and show how these were affec...

The surface microlayer (SML) is the uppermost thin layer of the ocean and influencing interactions between the air and sea, such as gas exchange, atmospheric deposition and aerosol emission. Organic matter (OM) plays a key role in air-sea exchange processes, but studying how the accumulation of organic compounds in the SML relates to biological pro...

Here, we present a range of interactions, which we term “cryptic interactions.” These are interactions that occur throughout the marine planktonic foodweb but are currently largely overlooked by established methods, which mean large‐scale data collection for these interactions is limited. Despite this, current evidence suggests some of these intera...

A key challenge in ecology is to understand how nutrients and light affect the biodiversity and community structure of phytoplankton and plant communities. According to resource competition models, ratios of limiting nutrients are major determinants of the species composition. At high nutrient levels, however, species interactions may shift to comp...

The flexible regulation of feeding behaviour and nutrient metabolism is a prerequisite for consumers to grow and survive under variable food conditions. Thus, it is essential to understand the ecological trade‐offs that restrict regulatory mechanisms in consumers to evaluate the consequences of nutrient limitations for trophic interactions. Here, w...

One of the major challenges in ecological stoichiometry is to establish how environmental changes in resource availability may affect both the biochemical composition of organisms and the species composition of communities. This is a pressing issue in many coastal waters, where anthropogenic activities have caused large changes in riverine nutrient...

Background: Mesocosm experiments have become increasingly popular in climate change research as they bridge the gap between small-scale, less realistic, microcosm experiments, and large-scale, more complex, natural systems. Characteristics of aquatic mesocosm designs (e.g., mesocosm volume, study duration, and replication) vary widely, potentially...

Anthropogenic activities resulted in major shifts in nutrient inputs to coastal seas, which may have altered the biomolecule composition of phytoplankton because of different C : N : P requirements for biosynthesis. In order to understand the effects of N- and P-limitation on the allocation of photosynthetically fixed C, we directly measured season...

The aim of the work presented in this thesis was to determine the effects of nutrient availability on the biomolecule composition and synthesis in North Sea phytoplankton. Nutrient availability in coastal seas has changed substantially over the past decades due to anthropogenic activities. Riverine nutrient loads and consequently nutrient ratios of...

Measurement of total primary production using 13C incorporation is a widely established tool. However, these bulk measurements lack information about the fate of fixed carbon: the production of major cellular compounds (carbohydrates, amino acids, fatty acids, and DNA/RNA) is affected by for instance nutrient availability as their C:N:P requirement...

Coastal waters have been affected by eutrophication and subsequent “restoring efforts”, which induced changes in riverine nutrient loads and altered the relative nutrient availability. As a consequence, changes in the limiting resource can alter the biochemical composition of phytoplankton and propagate through the food web, affecting its structure...

The influence of the Mekong River (South China Sea) on N2 fixation and phytoplankton distribution was investigated during the lowest- and highest-discharge seasons (April 2007 and September 2008, respectively). The river plays an essential role in providing nutrients (nitrate, phosphate, silicate) for the adjacent sea and creates different salinity...

The cyanobacterium Trichodesmium spp. plays an important role in fostering primary and secondary production in large areas of the tropical and subtropical ocean. It is able to fix atmospheric nitrogen (N2) and subsequently releases up to 80% of it as ammonium and dissolved organic nitrogen. Even though Trichodesmium spp. occurs primarily on the oce...