Abstract
Oxygen production due to phytoplankton photosynthesis is a crucial phenomenon underlying the dynamics of marine ecosystems. However, most of the existing literature focus on other aspects of the plankton community functioning, thus leaving the issue of the coupled oxygen-plankton dynamics understudied. In this paper, we consider a generic model of the oxygen-phytoplankton-zooplankton dynamics to make an insight into the basic properties of the plankton-oxygen interactions. The model is analyzed both analytically and numerically. We first consider the nonspatial model and show that it predicts possible oxygen depletion under certain environmental conditions. We then consider the spatially explicit model and show that it exhibits a rich variety of spatiotemporal patterns including travelling fronts of oxygen depletion, dynamical stabilization of unstable equilibrium and spatiotemporal chaos.
Highlights
About 70 per cent of the earth’s surface is covered by the oceans [13]
In spite of a vast literature related to the marine ecosystems modelling, the dynamics of the dissolved oxygen concentration as an essential component of a plankton system has not been studied in sufficient detail
We begin with a simple conceptual model that only takes into account the temporal dynamics of the oxygen itself and the phytoplankton as its main producer: dc(t) dt
Summary
About 70 per cent of the earth’s surface is covered by the oceans [13]. Plankton are floating organisms of many different phyla living in the pelagial of the oceans. Conceptual prey-predator-type models to describe the phytoplankton and zooplankton interaction in marine ecosystems subject to turbulent mixing were considered in much detail in [4, 16, 20, 21, 31] but with no attention to the oxygen production In another mathematical study, Edwards and Brindley [7] investigated the dynamics of a coupled plankton-nutrients system, but did not pay any attention to their possible relation to dissolved oxygen. In spite of a vast literature related to the marine ecosystems modelling, the dynamics of the dissolved oxygen concentration as an essential component of a plankton system has not been studied in sufficient detail This issue is obviously of significant practical and theoretical importance.
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