Abstract
Decreasing level of dissolved oxygen has recently been reported as a growing ecological problem in seas and oceans around the world. Concentration of oxygen is an important indicator of the marine ecosystem’s health as lack of oxygen (anoxia) can lead to mass mortality of marine fauna. The oxygen decrease is thought to be a result of global warming as warmer water can contain less oxygen. Actual reasons for the observed oxygen decay remain controversial though. Recently, it has been shown that it may as well result from a disruption of phytoplankton photosynthesis. In this paper, we further explore this idea by considering the model of coupled plankton-oxygen dynamics in two spatial dimensions. By means of extensive numerical simulations performed for different initial conditions and in a broad range of parameter values, we show that the system’s dynamics normally lead to the formation of a rich variety of patterns. We reveal how these patterns evolve when the system approaches the tipping point, i.e., the boundary of the safe parameter range beyond which the depletion of oxygen is the only possibility. In particular, we show that close to the tipping point the spatial distribution of the dissolved oxygen tends to become more regular; arguably, this can be considered as an early warning of the approaching catastrophe.
Highlights
Oxygen is an important indicator of the marine ecosystem’s health
Its depletion may lead to severe ecological problems resulting in mass mortality of marine fauna
[10,11,12], heterogeneity we considered considered aa novel novel model model of of coupled coupled plankton-oxygen plankton-oxygen dynamics dynamics and and showed showed that that itit is is capable capable of of we producing transient, transient, irregular, irregular, self-organized self-organized spatial spatial patterns
Summary
Oxygen is an important indicator of the marine ecosystem’s health. Its depletion may lead to severe ecological problems resulting in mass mortality of marine fauna. An understanding of the dynamics of the dissolved oxygen is important in order to forecast emerging anoxic events and the corresponding ecological disasters. For this reason, the dynamics of oxygen in marine ecosystems has been a focus of both empirical and theoretical research for a few decades [1,2,3,4,5]. Hull et al [2] investigated dissolved oxygen concentration in another multi-component system paying particular attention to the role of bacteria and the effect of the environmental forcing (through wind, solar radiation and temperature) on lagoon dynamics. Caruso et al [7] considered a stochastic model linking the plankton dynamics to the climatic changes and the variations in 18 O isotope
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