Question

easy on North Atlantic zooplankton populations ​

Answer 1

zooplankton time series across the Atlantic region and its inland seas. Across a broad range of geographic regions and ecological environments, the impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on interannual changes in the zooplankton populations was evident. Across the mid-Atlantic, a correlation between the NAO and zooplankton abundance was present and remained positive from the northwestern Atlantic through the enclosed seas of the far eastern Atlantic. Following high NAO years, these regions experienced higher total zooplankton abundance or biomass. Following low NAO years, this trend was reversed. A time lag in the zooplankton response to the NAO was also evident, influenced more by the scale of the water basin than by latitudinal or longitudinal location. For some regions, the correlation between zooplankton and the NAO was higher when the NAO was substituted with its sub-components: the Azores High (AH) and the Icelandic Low (IL) atmospheric pressure systems. This suggests that decomposition of the NAO into its components might enhance the sensitivity of the analysis of biological time series with regard to climate change.
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Answer 2

Marine plankton have been conspicuously affected by recent climate change, responding with profound spatial relocations and shifts in the timing of their seasonal occurrence. These changes directly affect the global carbon cycle by altering the transport of organic material from the surface ocean to depth, with consequences that remain poorly understood. We investigated how distributional and abundance changes of copepods, the dominant group of zooplankton, have affected biogenic carbon cycling. We used trait-based, mechanistic models to estimate the magnitude of carbon transported downward through sinking faecal pellets, daily vertical migration and seasonal hibernation at depth. From such estimates for over 200,000 community observations in the northern North Atlantic we found carbon flux increased along the northwestern boundary of the study area and decreased in the open northern North Atlantic during the past 55 years. These changes in export were primarily associated with changes in copepod biomass, driven by shifting distributions of abundant, large-bodied species. Our findings highlight how recent climate change has affected downward carbon transport by altering copepod community structure and demonstrate how carbon fluxes through plankton communities can be mechanistically implemented in next-generation biogeochemical models with size-structured representations of zooplankton communities.