Program  
 
Biogeochemistry in oligotrophic ocean gyres
 
 
 
Poster
Viral module optimizes marine biogeochemical model performance
P-M2-02-S
Le Xie* , State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University
Rui Zhang, State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University
Ya-Wei Luo, State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University
Presenter Email: xiele@stu.xmu.edu.cn

Viruses are the most abundant biological entities in the ocean. They infect and kill marine bacteria and other organisms, and meanwhile recycle nutrients and greatly contribute to marine biogeochemical cycles. However, viral component has not been explicitly represented in most marine biogeochemical models, but instead implicitly represented by constant mortality rates of microbes. In a few exceptions of modeling studies, even viruses were explicitly represented, fixed virus-induced mortality was still used. In this study, a viral module was added to a biogeochemical model to simulate the temporal and spatial dynamics between viruses and bacteria. The model was applied to Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT) station. Compared to the non-virus model, the new model with the viral module increased the bacterial mortality at surface while decreased it at deep, leading to a vertical distribution of bacterial abundance better fitted to the observations. Our results tentatively demonstrate the importance of explicit representation of viruses and dynamic viral-induced microbial mortality in marine biogeochemical models, improving the model performance in material cycles and energy flows especially in the microbial loop.

 
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