Markus Schartau

GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel · Research Unit Biogeochemical Modelling

Probability density functions (PDFs) provide information about the probability of a random variable taking on a specific value. In geoscience, data distributions are often expressed by a parametric estimation of their PDF, such as, for example, a Gaussian distribution. At present there is growing attention towards the analysis of non-parametric est...

The similarity of the average ratios of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in marine dissolved inorganic and particulate organic matter, dN:P and pN:P, respectively, indicates tight links between those pools in the world ocean. Here, we analyze this linkage by varying phytoplankton N and P subsistence quotas in an optimality-based ecosystem model coup...

Probability density functions (PDFs) comprise basic information about the variability of observed or simulated variables within a system of interest. In geoscience data distributions are often expressed by a parametric estimation of their PDF, such as e.g. a Gaussian distribution. At present there is a growing attention towards the analysis of non-...

Global biogeochemical ocean models help to investigate the present and potential future state of the ocean biogeochemistry, its productivity and cascading effects on higher trophic levels such as fish. They are often subjectively tuned against data sets of inorganic tracers and surface chlorophyll and only very rarely against organic components suc...

Understanding how marine microbial food webs and their ecosystem functions are changing is crucial for projections of the future ocean. Often, simplified food web models are employed and their solutions are only evaluated against available observations of plankton biomass. With such an approach, it remains unclear how different underlying trophic i...

The seasonal variation in concentration of transparent exopolymer particles (TEPs), particulate organic carbon (POC) and particulate organic nitrogen (PON) were investigated together with floc size and the concentration of suspended particulate matter (SPM) along the cross‐shore gradient, from the high turbid nearshore toward the low‐turbid offshor...

Earth System Sciences have been generating increasingly larger amounts of heterogeneous data in recent years. We identify the need to combine Earth System Sciences with Data Sciences, and give our perspective on how this could be accomplished within the sub-field of Marine Sciences. Marine data hold abundant information and insights that Data Scien...

Marine particulate organic carbon stable isotope ratios (δ13CPOC) provide insights into understanding carbon cycling through the atmosphere, ocean and biosphere. They have for example been used to trace the input of anthropogenic carbon in the marine ecosystem due to the distinct isotopically light signature of anthropogenic emissions. However, δ13...

The ability of marine diazotrophs to fix dinitrogen gas (N 2 ) is one of the most influential yet enigmatic processes in the ocean. With their activity diazotrophs support biological production by fixing about 100–200 Tg N/year and turning otherwise unavailable dinitrogen into bioavailable nitrogen (N), an essential limiting nutrient. Despite their...

Marine particulate organic carbon-13 stable isotope ratios (δ13CPOC) provide insights in understanding carbon cycling through the atmosphere, ocean, and biosphere. They have been used to trace the input of anthropogenic carbon in the marine ecosystem due to the distinct isotopically light signature of anthropogenic emissions. However, δ13CPOC is al...

The Arctic Ocean is subject to severe environmental changes, including the massive decline in sea ice due to continuous warming in many regions. Along with these changes, the Arctic Ocean's ecosystem is affected on various scales. The pelagic microbial food web of the Arctic is of particular interest, because it determines mass transfer to higher t...

Ocean acidification (OA) will affect marine biotas from the organism to the ecosystem level. Yet, the consequences for the biological carbon pump and thereby the oceanic sink for atmospheric CO2 are still unclear. Here we show that OA considerably alters the C/N ratio of organic-matter export (C/N export), a key factor determining efficiency of the...

We analyse 400 perturbed-parameter simulations for two configurations of an optimality-based plankton–ecosystem model (OPEM), implemented in the University of Victoria Earth System Climate Model (UVic-ESCM), using a Latin hypercube sampling method for setting up the parameter ensemble. A likelihood-based metric is introduced for model assessment an...

Controlled manipulation of environmental conditions within large enclosures in the ocean, so-called pelagic mesocosms, has become a standard method to explore potential responses of marine plankton communities to anthropogenic change. Among the challenges of interpreting mesocosm data is the often uncertain role of vertical mixing, which usually is...

Three-dimensional hydrogels of organic polymers have been suggested to affect a variety of processes in the ocean, including element cycling, microbial ecology, food-web dynamics, and air-sea exchange. However, their abundance and distribution in the ocean are hardly known, strongly limiting an assessment of their global significance. As a conseque...

Protecting the ocean has become a major goal of international policy as human activities increasingly endanger the integrity of the ocean ecosystem, often summarized as “ocean health.” By and large, efforts to protect the ocean have failed because, among other things, (1) the underlying socio-ecological pathways have not been properly considered, a...

Abstract. We analyse 400 perturbed-parameter simulations for two configurations of an optimality-based plankton-ecosystem model (OPEM), implemented in the University of Victoria Earth-System Climate Model (UVic-ESCM), using a Latin-Hypercube sampling method for setting up the parameter ensemble. A likelihood-based metric is introduced for model ass...

Abstract. Controlled manipulation of environmental conditions within large enclosures in the ocean, so-called pelagic mesocosms, has become a standard method to explore potential responses of marine plankton communities to anthropogenic change. Among the challenges of interpreting mesocosm data is the often uncertain role of vertical mixing, which...

The Baltic Sea is prone to oxygen deficiency due to the restricted water exchange with the North Sea in coincidence with a high biological oxygen demand. The partitioning of organic carbon between respiration, accumulation and export is co-determined by phytoplankton primary production and its subsequent bacterial remineralization. Here, we investi...

Marine phytoplankton can regulate their stoichiometric composition in response to variations in the availability of nutrients, light and the pH of seawater. Varying elemental composition of photoautotrophs affects several important ecological and biogeochemical processes, e.g., primary and export production, nutrient cycling, calcification, and gra...

A central aspect of coastal biogeochemistry is to determine how nutrients, lithogenic and organic matter are distributed and transformed within coastal and estuarine environments. Analyses of the spatio-temporal changes of total suspended matter (TSM) concentration indicate strong and variable linkages between intertidal fringes and pelagic regions...

Mesocosm experiments on phytoplankton dynamics under high CO2 concentrations mimic the response of marine primary producers to future ocean acidification. However, potential acidification effects can be hindered by the high standard deviation typically found in the replicates of the same CO2 treatment level. In experiments with multiple unresolved...

The effect of ocean acidification on growth and calcification of the marine algae Emiliania huxleyi was investigated in a series of mesocosm experiments where enclosed water volumes that comprised a natural plankton community were exposed to different carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. Calcification rates observed during those experiments were fo...

Estuary-type circulation is a residual circulation in coastal systems with horizontal density gradients. It drives the accumulation of suspended particulate matter in coastal embayments where density gradients are sustained by some freshwater inflow from rivers. Ebenhöh et al. (Ecol Model 174(3):241–252, 2004) found that shallow water depth can exp...

To describe the underlying processes involved in oceanic plankton dynamics is crucial for the determination of energy and mass flux through an ecosystem and for the estimation of biogeochemical element cycling. Many planktonic ecosystem models were developed to resolve major processes so that flux estimates can be derived from numerical simulations...

Despite the huge extent of the ocean's surface, until now relatively little attention has been paid to the sea surface microlayer (SML) as the ultimate interface where heat, momentum and mass exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere takes place. Via the SML, large-scale environmental changes in the ocean such as warming, acidification, deoxyge...

A series of studies were conducted during the last two decades to investigate effects of ocean acidification (OA) on phytoplankton physiology, plankton ecology, and biogeochemical dynamics of marine ecosystems. Among those studies are experiments with tanks or bags called mesocosms, with some enclosed water volume that typically comprised a natural...

To describe the underlying processes involved in oceanic plankton dynamics is crucial for the determination of energy and mass flux through an ecosystem and for the estimation of biogeochemical element cycling. Many planktonic ecosystem models were developed to resolve major processes so that flux estimates can be derived from numerical simulations...

Chlorophyll (chl a) concentration in coastal seas exhibits variability on various spatial and temporal scales. Resuspension of particulate matter can somewhat limit algal growth, but can also enhance productivity because of the intrusion of nutrient-rich pore water from sediments or bottom water layers into the whole water column. This study invest...

For most marine ecosystems the growth of diazotrophic cyanobacteria and the associated amount of nitrogen fixation are regulated by the availability of phosphorus. The intensity of summer blooms of nitrogen (N 2) fixing algae in the Baltic Sea is assumed to be determinable from a surplus of dissolved inorganic phosphorus (DIP) that remains after th...

This study describes a sensitivity analysis that allows the parameters of a one-dimensional ecosystem model to be ranked according to their specificity in determining biochemical key fluxes. Key fluxes of interest are annual (a) total production (TP), (b) remineralization above the halocline (RM), and (c) export at 50 m (EX) at the Baltic Sea monit...

This study describes a sensitivity analysis that allows the parameters of a one-dimensional ecosystem model to be ranked according to their specificity in determining biochemical key fluxes. Key fluxes of interest are annual (a) total production (TP), (b) remineralization above the halocline (RM), and (c) export at 50 m (EX) at the Baltic Sea monit...

Effects of CO2 concentration on elemental composition of the coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi were studied in phosphorus-limited, continuous cultures that were acclimated to experimental conditions for 30 d prior to the first sampling. We determined phytoplankton and bacterial cell numbers, nutrients, particulate components like organic carbon (PO...

For most marine ecosystems the growth of diazotrophic cyanobacteria and the associated amount of nitrogen fixation are regulated by the availability of phosphorus. The intensity of summer blooms of nitrogen (N2) fixing algae in the Baltic Sea is assumed to be determinable from a surplus of dissolved inorganic phosphorus (DIP) that remains after the...

Effects of CO2 concentration on elemental composition of the coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi were studied in phosphorus-limited, continuous cultures that were acclimated to experimental conditions for 30 days prior to the first sampling. We determined phytoplankton and bacterial cell numbers, nutrients, particulate components like organic carbon...

Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations may cause enhanced oceanic CO2 concentrations and thus ongoing acidification of the marine environment. Effects of acidification on the coastal ocean exhibit large variabilities due to shallow water column, tight benthic-pelagic coupling, nutrient cycling, and discharge from land. As a result of enhanced biogeo...

Rising atmospheric and in turn oceanic CO2 concentrations cause an ongoing acidification of the marine environment. The pH variations in coastal- and shelf regions can be up to an order of magnitude higher than in the open ocean. The near-shore effects of acidification are difficult to determine, because of the shallow water column and the tight co...

Many critical processes of ecosystem function, including trophic relationships between predators and prey and maximum rates of photosynthesis and growth, are size-dependent. Size spectral data are therefore precious to modellers because they can constrain model predictions of size-dependent processes. Here we illustrate a multi-step statistical app...

Although the carbonate chemistry and physical aspects of ocean acidification are well constrained, its biological effects are not fully understood. Experimental research has shown large variability in responses to increased atmospheric CO2 input into the ocean, ranging from positive to zero and negative effects. Global models vary strongly in their...

The biogeochemical fluxes of carbon and nitrogen are tightly coupled via the production of biomass. The degree of this coupling is known to vary under different environmental conditions. Nitrogen limitation of phytoplankton organisms leads to increased C:N biomass ratios whereas light limitation at nutrient replete conditions causes a decrease in i...

The influence of seawater carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration on the size distribution of suspended particles (2–60 μm) and on phytoplankton abundance was investigated during a mesocosm experiment at the large scale facility (LFS) in Bergen, Norway, in the frame of the Pelagic Ecosystem CO2 Enrichment study (PeECE II). In nine outdoor enclosures the...

[1] Application of biogeochemical models to the study of marine ecosystems is pervasive, yet objective quantification of these models ’ performance is rare. Here, 12 lower trophic level models of varying complexity are objectively assessed in two distinct regions (equatorial Pacific and Arabian Sea). Each model was run within an identical onedimens...

Application of biogeochemical models to the study of marine ecosystems is pervasive, yet objective quantification of these models’ performance is rare. Here, 12 lower trophic level models of varying complexity are objectively assessed in two distinct regions (equatorial Pacific and Arabian Sea). Each model was run within an identical one- dimension...

During phytoplankton growth a fraction of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) assimilated by phytoplankton is exuded in the form of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), which can be transformed into extracellular particulate organic carbon (POC). A major fraction of extracellular POC is associated with carbon of transparent exopolymer particles (TEP; carbo...

In this paper, we review the state of the art and major challenges in current efforts to incorporate biogeochemical functional groups into models that can be applied on basin-wide and global scales, with an emphasis on models that might ultimately be used to predict how biogeochemical cycles in the ocean will respond to global warming. We define th...

1] By means of numerical modeling, we analyze the cycling of iron between its various physical (dissolved, colloidal, particulate) and chemical (redox state and organic complexation) forms in the upper mixed layer. With our proposed model it is possible to obtain a first quantitative assessment of how this cycling influences iron uptake by phytopla...

A marine ecosystem model, that had previously been calibrated in a one-dimensional (1D) mode against observations at three time-series and process-study sites simultaneously, is coupled to a three-dimensional (3D) circulation model of the North and Equatorial Atlantic. Compared to an experiment with a previously employed subjectively tuned ecosyste...

This study relates the performance of an optimized one-dimensional ecosystem model to observations at three sites in the North Atlantic Ocean: the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series Study (BATS, 31N 64W), the location of the North Atlantic Bloom Experiment (NABE, 47N 20W), and Ocean Weather Ship INDIA (OWS-INDIA, 59N 19W). The ecosystem model is based on...

An optimization experiment is performed with a vertically resolved, nitrogen-based ecosystem model, composed of four state variables (NPZD-model): dissolved inorganic nitrogen (N), phytoplankton (P), herbivorous zooplankton (Z) and detritus (D). Parameter values of the NPZD-model are optimized while assimilating observations at three locations in t...

We present a comprehensive model of the iron cycling within the mixed layer of the ocean, which predicts the time course of iron concentration and speciation. The speciation of iron within the mixed layer is heavily influenced by photochemistry, organic complexation, colloid formation and aggregation, as well as uptake and release by marine biota....

One particular task of marine ecosystem models is to simulate the biogenic transformation of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) into organic matter and hence to quantify the export of particulate organic carbon (POC) to deep oceanic layers. To date, environmental changes, such as increasing carbon dioxide concentrations (pCO_2) and temperature, are p...

Iron speciation within the mixed layer of the ocean depends on a large number of processes like organic complexation, photochemistry and solute-particle interactions. The kinetic parameters of some of these processes are not yet well constrained by observations. A full model of iron speciation therefore contains many state variables and parameters,...

The export of organic carbon to the deep ocean is mediated by sinking of large particles, such as marine snow, the formation of which is enhanced in the presence of transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) . TEP form from dissolved and colloidal polysaccharides by aggregation processes. Especially when running into nutrient limitation phytoplankton o...

This study relates the performance of an optimized one-dimensional ecosystem model to observations at three sites in the North Atlantic Ocean: the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series Study (BATS, 31N 64W), the location of the North Atlantic Bloom Experiment (NABE, 47N 20W), and Ocean Weather Ship INDIA (OWS-INDIA, 59N 19W). The ecosystem model is based on...

An optimization experiment is performed with a vertically resolved, nitrogen-based ecosystem model, composed of four state variables (NPZD-model): dissolved inorganic nitrogen (N), phytoplankton (P), herbivorous zooplankton (Z) and detritus (D). Parameter values of the NPZD-model are optimized while assimilating observations at three locations in t...

Dust deposition is the primary source of iron at the Bermuda Atlantic Timeseries Station (BATS). It is believed that the residence time and the bioavailability of the deposited iron depends primarily on its speciation within the oceanic mixed layer. We present a model that describes the cycling of iron between its various physical (dis- solved, col...

An optimisation experiment is performed with a vertically resolved, nitrogen based ecosystem model, comprising four state variables (1D-NPZD model): dissolved inor- ganic nitrogen (N), phytoplankton (P), herbivorous zooplankton (Z) and detritus (D). Parameter values of the NPZD-model are optimised while regarding observational data from three locat...

Assimilation experiments with data from the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS, 1989}1993) were performed with a simple mixed-layer ecosystem model of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (N), phytoplankton (P) and herbivorous zooplankton (H). Our aim is to optimize the biological model parameters, such that the mis"ts between model results and obser...

The overall goal of this work is to investigate the performance of ecosystem models and to relate their results to existing observations in the North Atlantic. Different data assimilation methods are applied. A variational adjoint technique and a micro-generic algorithm (mGA) are utilized to estimate model parameters, such that the misfit between m...

Sinking velocities of more than 300 Nitzschia closterium aggregates were determined during roller table incubation using digital image analysis. To examine the influence of transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) on aggregate settling speed, 3 experiments with different ratios of TEP to cell volume concentration were conducted. The results showed th...

Sinking velocities of more than 300 Nitzschia closterium aggregates were determined during roller table incubation using digital image analysis. To examine the influence of transparent exopolymer particles (TEP) on aggregate settling speed. 3 experiments with different ratios of TEP to cell volume concentration were conducted. The results showed th...

C:N Regulated Ecosystem Model (REcoM), developed within the TOPAZ project and describing the carbon and nitrogen fluxes between components of the ocean ecosystem, is validated for two different locations in the North Atlantic . The subject of the study is to investigate whether the model is applicable for the MERSEA operational use on a basin scale...