PELAGIC PLANKTON NET COMMUNITY PRODUCTION AND RESPIRATION IN THE SEA OF MARMARA

2023-8-28
KAZAK, MELİKE
Respiration is a critical process in biological pump with primary production. This study quantified net community production (NCP) and community respiration (CR) for stations selected from various locations in the Sea of Marmara for the March 2022 and June 2022 seasons. NCP and CR experiments were conducted as in-vitro bottle incubations at in-situ temperature using a relatively new tool in aquatic science: OPTODES (fiber optical oxygen sensors). One of the essential aspects of this study is that community respiration samples were taken from different depths in both the euphotic zone and the sub-halocline to represent community respiration in the water column. In general, CR had a decreasing pattern with depth and it was positively correlated with dissolved oxygen and particulate organic carbon. For the euphotic zone, in March 2022, the hourly CR rate was in the range of 0.01-2.05 μmol O2 L-1 h-1, and in June 2022, it was in the range of 0.01-1.63 μmol O2 L-1 h-1. Sub-halocline community respiration rates were calculated as 89 ± 111mg C m-3 day-1 for March, 2022 and 75 ± 35 mg C m-3 day-1 for June, 2022. Spatial differences in hourly NCP rates were found to be positively correlated with dissolved oxygen and Chl-a. When the daily NCP for the Sea of Marmara is roughly calculated, the system was found to be heterotrophic, especially in less productive seasons.
Citation Formats
M. KAZAK, “PELAGIC PLANKTON NET COMMUNITY PRODUCTION AND RESPIRATION IN THE SEA OF MARMARA,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2023.