Work by Andrew Barton and Charlie Stock (Princeton/GFDL) and Andrew Irwin and Zoe Finkel showing how North Atlantic phytoplankton communities may chnage over the next century was published today in PNAS.

A news story about this work appeared on the BBC website.

SACKVILLE, NB — Mount Allison University geography and environment professor Dr. Zoe Finkel is part of an international group of researchers looking to fossils to help identify marine animals and areas of the ocean with a higher risk of extinction. The group’s paper has been published in the journal Science.

Finkel, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Marine Environmental Ecology and has co-ordinated the Environmental Science program at Mount Allison, says that the …

Our study of phytoplankton niches at Station Cariaco show that phytoplankton can evolve and change their niches over a 10-15 year period. The figure below shows the distribution of mean phytoplankton niche for temperature, irradiance, and nitrate concentration in a cooler period (blue) and a warmer period (red). Temperature and irradiance niches shift to track changes in the environment. The niches of some phytoplankton shift to lower nitrate concentrations as nitrate …