Marine ecosystems distribution

Environmental chemists funded by the Department of Energy have studied these sources to learn as much as they can about the chemistry of plutonium dispersed in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Much of the early work determined the concentrations in various water bodies and the distribution between water and sediment. Table I shows results of various freshwater and marine surveys(10). 

Wade TL, Quinn JG. 1980. Incorporation, distribution, and fate of saturated petroleum hydrocarbons in sediments from a controlled marine ecosystem. Marine Environmental Research 3(1) 15-34. 

A mouse bioassay method is useful for screening of the toxicity of various organisms from affected areas, although this method may not be sufficient for the identification of the toxin. Recently, distribution of tetrodotoxin in the marine ecosystem has expanded from puffer-fishes to some other animals. Rapid and accurate determination of the toxin occurring in those organisms is becoming increasingly important from the public health standpoint. 

Essentially, this concerns formation of a software package, the input to which will be data on the spatial distribution of land and marine ecosystems, as well as sets of scenarios of anthropogenic processes and climatic trends. Such a database will be continuously updated and provide sequences of models to provide reliable forecasts of the dynamics of these ecosystems and will facilitate realization of hypothetic scenarios for Arctic environmental control. 

Takahashi, S., Tanabe, S., Takeuchi, I., Miyazaki, N., 1999. Distribution and specific bioaccumulation of butyltin compounds in a marine ecosystem. Arch. Environ. Contam. 

Very little is known about the removal of DMS from seawater. Bacterial and photochemical oxidation undoubtedly result in DMSO and further-oxidized products. It is not clear what percentage of DMS formed in seawater actually reaches the atmosphere. Its flux to the atmosphere certainly plays a major role in the chemistry of the atmosphere. A thorough understanding of the global distribution and dynamics of that flux will depend on obtaining an increased understanding of the processes that control tne dynamics of DMS in marine ecosystems. 

Seitzinger, S.P., and Kroeze, C. (1998) Global distribution of nitrous oxide production and N inputs in freshwater and coastal marine ecosystems. Global Biogeochem. Cycles 12, 93-113. 

Plankton patchiness is widely acknowledged as a ubiquitous and key feature of marine ecosystems (Martin 2003). Many organisms have been shown to exploit patches of food (e.g., Tiselius 1992), and patch formation may be important in the foraging success of many marine invertebrates (Seuront et al. 2001) and vertebrates (Cartamil and Lowe 2004), as well as for the sexual encounters among individuals of relatively rare species (Buskey 1998). While the quantification of the spatial and temporal structure of phytoplankton distributions has for the most part focussed on empirical observations at scales greater... 

Abstract Seawater concentrations of the climatecooling, volatile sulphur compound dimethylsulphide (DMS) are the result of numerous production and consumption processes within the marine ecosystem. Due to this complex nature, it is difficult to predict temporal and geographical distribution patterns of DMS concentrations and the inclusion of DMS into global ocean climate models has only been attempted recently. Comparisons between individual model predictions, and ground-truthing exercises revealed that information on the functional... 

The reverse situation may be true with respect to the distribution of dissolved molecular hydrogen in the ocean. Schink s observations (4) of diel variation of hydrogen concentrations in the controlled ecosystem population experiment containers and in the Marine Ecosystem Research Laboratory tanks have been confirmed in the open ocean by Herr et al. (5). Hydrogen is probably produced either in the guts of zooplankton or fish, or by cyanobacteria. Dissolved hydrogen typically decreases with depth below the photic zone apparently, the gas is consumed by microflora in the deep ocean. Such consumption occurs in freshwater (6) and anaerobic (7) systems. 

K. Honda, Y. Yamamoto, R. Tatsukawa, Distribution of heavy metals in Antarctic marine ecosystem. Proceedings of the NIPR Symposium on Polar Biology, 1 (1987), 184-197. 

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