NPG Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics NPG Nonlin. Processes Geophys. 1607-7946 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/npg-17-715-2010 Inhomogeneous dominance patterns of competing phytoplankton groups in the wake of an island Bastine D. 1 Feudel U. 1 Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, Theoretical Physics/Complex Systems, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany 08 12 2010 17 6 715 731 Copyright: © 2010 D. Bastine 2010 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/17/715/2010/npg-17-715-2010.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://npg.copernicus.org/articles/17/715/2010/npg-17-715-2010.pdf

We investigate the competition between two different functional groups of phytoplankton in the wake of an island close to a coastal upwelling region. We couple a simple biological model with three trophic levels and a hydrodynamic model of a von Kármán vortex street. The spatio-temporal abundance shows that the different phytoplankton groups dominate in different regions of the flow. The composition of the phytoplankton community varies e.g. for the different vortices. We study the mechanism leading to these inhomogeneous dominance patterns by investigating the nutrient transport in the flow and the interplay of hydrodynamic and biological time scales.

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