Seawater carbonate chemistry and mesozooplankton abundances of KOSMOS 2014 mesocosm study

DOI

Ocean acidification (OA) is affecting marine ecosystems through changes in carbonate chemistry that may influence consumers of phytoplankton, often via trophic pathways. Using a mesocosm approach, we investigated OA effects on a subtropical zooplankton community during oligotrophic, bloom, and post-bloom phases under a range of different pCO2 levels (from 400 to 1480 μatm). Furthermore, we simulated an upwelling event by adding 650 m-depth nutrient-rich water to the mesocosms, which initiated a phytoplankton bloom. No effects of pCO2 on the zooplankton community were visible in the oligotrophic conditions before the bloom. The zooplankton community responded to phytoplankton bloom by increased abundances in all treatments, although the response was delayed under high-pCO2 conditions. Microzooplankton was dominated by small dinoflagellates and aloricate ciliates, which were more abundant under medium- to high-pCO2 conditions. The most abundant mesozooplankters were calanoid copepods, which did not respond to CO2 treatments during the oligotrophic phase of the experiment but were found in higher abundance under medium- and high-pCO2 conditions toward the end of the experiment, most likely as a response to increased phyto- and microzooplankton standing stocks. The second most abundant mesozooplankton taxon were appendicularians, which did not show a response to the different pCO2 treatments. Overall, CO2 effects on zooplankton seemed to be primarily transmitted through significant CO2 effects on phytoplankton and therefore indirect pathways. We conclude that elevated pCO2 can change trophic cascades with significant effects on zooplankton, what might ultimately affect higher trophic levels in the future.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2021) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2021-04-30.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.931217
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00061
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.925263
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.887283
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seacarb/index.html
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.931217
Provenance
Creator Algueró-Muñiz, Maria; Horn, Henriette G ORCID logo; Alvarez-Fernandez, Santiago; Spisla, Carsten; Aberle, Nicole ORCID logo; Bach, Lennart Thomas ORCID logo; Guan, WanChun ORCID logo; Achterberg, Eric Pieter; Riebesell, Ulf (ORCID: 0000-0002-9442-452X); Boersma, Maarten (ORCID: 0000-0003-1010-026X)
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2019
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 3991 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-15.365 LON, 27.928 LAT); Subtropical North Atlantic
Temporal Coverage Begin 2014-09-28T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2014-11-26T00:00:00Z