Plankton blooms and patchiness generated by heterogeneous physical environments |
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Affiliation: | 1. Environmental Hydraulics Institute “IH Cantabria”, Universidad de Cantabria, Spain;2. Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), The Netherlands;3. Landscape Ecology Group, Institute for Biology and Environment, University of Oldenburg, Germany;1. School of Mathematics and Statistics, Northeast Normal University, 5268 Renmin Street, Changchun, Jilin, 130024, PR China;2. School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1804, USA |
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Abstract: | Microscopic turbulent motions of water have been shown to influence the dynamics of microscopic species living in that habitat. The number, stability, and excitability of stationary states in a predator–prey model of plankton species can therefore change when the strength of turbulent motions varies. In a spatial system these microscopic turbulent motions are naturally of different strength and form a heterogeneous physical environment. Spatially neighboring plankton communities with different physical conditions can impact each other due to diffusive coupling. We show that local variations in the physical conditions can influence the global system in form of propagating pulses of high population densities. For this we consider three different local predator–prey models with different local responses to variations in the physical environment. The degree of spatial heterogeneity can, depending on the model, promote or reduce the number of propagating pulses, which can be interpreted as patchy plankton distributions and recurrent blooms. |
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Keywords: | Plankton Predator–prey systems Two dimensional flows Reaction-diffusion equations Eddy diffusion |
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