Influence of turbulent advection on a phytoplankton ecosystem with nonuniform carrying capacity

Abstract

In this work we study a plankton ecosystem model in a turbulent flow. The plankton model we consider contains logistic growth with a spatially varying background carrying capacity and the flow dynamics are generated using the two-dimensional (2D) Navier-Stokes equations. We characterize the system in terms of a dimensionless parameter, gamma identical with TB/TF, which is the ratio of the ecosystem biological time scales TB and the flow time scales TF. We integrate this system numerically for different values of gamma until the mean plankton reaches a statistically stationary state and examine how the steady-state mean and variance of plankton depends on gamma. Overall we find that advection in the presence of a nonuniform background carrying capacity can lead to very different plankton distributions depending on the time scale ratio gamma. For small gamma the plankton distribution is very similar to the background carrying capacity field and has a mean concentration close to the mean carrying capacity. As gamma increases the plankton concentration is more influenced by the advection processes. In the largest gamma cases there is a homogenization of the plankton concentration and the mean plankton concentration approaches the harmonic mean, <1/K>(-1). We derive asymptotic approximations for the cases of small and large gamma. We also look at the dependence of the power spectra exponent, beta, on gamma where the power spectrum of plankton is proportional to k(-beta). We find that the power spectra exponent closely obeys beta=1+2/gamma as predicted by earlier studies using simple models of chaotic advection.