Early warning for Pseudo-nitzschia HABs on Pacific Northwest beaches: From plankton ecology to operational decision support

Certain species of the phytoplankton Pseudo-nitzschia (PN) produce a potent neurotoxin, domoic acid (DA), that bioaccumulates in shellfish, and can cause severe illness and death in humans. Past outbreaks have caused fisheries closures and millions of dollars of losses to crab and clam harvesters, and contributed to the death of many species of marine mammals. … Read more

Coltrane (Copepod Life-history Traits and Adaptation to Novel Environments)

The Coltrane (Copepod Life history Traits and Adaptation to New Environments) model is a mathematical framework for layering multiple levels of mesozooplankton biology on top of oceanographic models. It resolves 1) individual life history (strategy traits controlling growth, development, and size, diagnosed from a broad review of lab studies); 2) population dynamics (the time-dependent energy … Read more

Modeling Cascadia

The Cascadia model from the Univ of Washington Coastal Modeling Group is a realistic 3D model, implemented in ROMS, of the North American Pacific Northwest coast from mid-Oregon to mid-Vancouver Island, including the inland waters of the Salish Sea. It was developed as part of the NSF/NOAA PNWTOX (Pacific Northwest Toxins) project, based on previous … Read more

Connectivity among rivers and subbasins of Puget Sound

Compared with most large, temperate estuaries, the biogeochemistry of Puget Sound is highly marine dominated: 70% of dissolved nutrients come from the Pacific. Nevertheless, there’s significant policy and management interest in understanding watershed contributions of environmental stressors, e.g. nutrient loading in relation to hypoxia, and pathogen and pollutant impacts on commercial, recreational, and tribal shellfish … Read more

flowWeaver: Visualizing the circulation of the Pacific Northwest coast

flowWeaver is an interactive tool for exploring transport and connectivity patterns in high-resolution ocean models such as ROMS. The initial application (version 0.4.3) contains two weeks of Salish Sea and Pacific Northwest coastal circulation during summer 2005. The underlying ocean model is MoSSea (Modeling the Salish Sea). Pablo Otero has adapted flowWeaver for an operational … Read more

Adding fine-scale trophic complexity to a plankton model

Natural plankton communities are far more diverse than even a very complicated numerical model can account for. The ASTroCAT model (Allometric/Stochastic Trophic Complexity Analysis Tool) is an experiment in systematically resolving the complexity in phytoplankton–microzooplankton trophic interactions, and exploring the effects of this complexity on ecosystem structure, function, and predictability. This paper… Banas NS (2011) … Read more