reporting by Helen Hill
In a new paper, MIT-CBIOMES investigator Stephanie Dutkiewicz and collaborators use the Darwin ecosystem model to develop theories seeking to explain and predict phytoplankton biogeography.
Continue reading Exploring Phytoplankton Diversity
Reporting by Helen Hill for CBIOMES
CBIOMES postdoctoral fellow John Casey is a Microbial Oceanographer who combines observations, experimental approaches, and computational methods to better understand the diversity of metabolic and physiological designs that influence biogeochemical cycles.
Continue reading Relating Marine Picoplankton Cell Size and Metabolism
Reporting by Helen Hill for the MIT Darwin Project
The fourth Workshop on Trait-Based Approaches to Ocean Life, held August 18-21, 2019 at Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire in the UK was a wonderful opportunity for Darwin Group members to catch up with former colleagues while sharing current directions in marine ecology viewed through a traits lens.
Helen Hill | Darwin Project
Microbes mediate the global marine cycles of elements, modulating atmospheric CO2 and helping to maintain the oxygen we all breath yet there is much about them scientists still don’t understand. Now, an award from the Simons Foundation will give researchers from the Darwin Project access to bigger, better computing resources to model these communities and probe how they work. Continue reading Phytoplankton & Chips
Leaving the cold of a New England February behind, the Darwin team will be in full attendance at this year’s Ocean Sciences conference taking place February 23-28 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Idealized equilibrium models have attributed the observed size structure of marine communities to the interactions between nutrient and grazing control. In a new paper in the Journal of Plankton Research Ben Ward and co-authors Stephanie Dutkiewicz and Mick Follows examine this theory in a more realistic context using a size-structured global ocean food-web model, together with a much simplified version of the same model for which equilibrium solutions are readily obtained.
Continue reading Size Structure: exploring nutrient versus grazing control
Ward, B.A., S. Dutkiewicz, and M.J. Follows (2013), Top-down and bottom-up controls in a global size-structured plankton food-web model, Journal of Plankton Research , 0, 1-17, doi: 10.1093/plankt/fbt097
Fiksen, O., M.J. Follows and D.L. Aksnes (2013), Trait-based models of nutrient uptake in microbes extend the Michaelis-Menten framework, Limnology and Oceanography, vol. 58, pp. 193, doi: 10.4319/lo.2013.58.1.0193
Barton, A.D., Z.V. Finkel, B.A. Ward, D.G. Johns and M.J. Follows (2013), The roles of cell size and trophic strategy in North Atlantic diatom and dinoflagellate communities. Limnology and Oceanography, 58(1), 2013, 254-266, doi: 10.4319/lo.2013.58.1.0254
Kempes, C.P., S. Dutkiewicz, and M.J. Follows (2012), Growth, metabolic partitioning, and the size of microorganisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 109, 495-500, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1115585109