Environmental forcing of simple plankton models

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This paper examines the phenomenon of algal blooms in phytoplankton populations in the context of a simple spatially homogeneous model. The effects of a changing environment are represented by time dependence in the model's parameters. It is argued that the interaction of grazing pressure and nutrient limitation gives rise to excitability in the dynamics of the model. This property allows the use of asymptotic analysis to derive a connection between the nature of the environmental forcing and the production of a bloom. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy of this analysis and also show how. and under what conditions, its effectiveness starts to break down. Some of the biological implications of these results are discussed.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: