IRONAGES Team

Coordination at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, E-mails: debaar@nioz.nl, klaas@nioz.nl

 

Iron resources and oceanic nutrients - advancement of global environment simulations

 

Iron limits phytoplankton growth in more than 40 percent of the oceans and is a co-limitation in the remaining 60 percent of surface waters. Moreover the paradigm of a single limiting factor for plankton blooms has given way to the concept of co-limitation by light, and the nutrient elements N, Fe, P and Si. Primary production, export into the deep sea, and CO2 uptake from the atmosphere together form the biological pump in Ocean Biogeochemical Climate Models (OBCM's). The IRONAGES project is a consortium of 12 European institutes developing more realistic OBCM's for budgeting and exchanges of both CO2 and DMS, by implementing the following improvements: (i) co-limitation by four nutrients N, Fe, P, Si simultaneously; (ii) five major bloom-forming taxonomic groups, the diatoms, calcifiers, N2-fixers, Phaecystis sp. and nano-pico-plankton; (iii) DMS(P) pathways; (iv) integrated plankton ecosystem modeling; (v) realistic global oceanic iron cycling, on basis of: (vi) iron supply from below reducing sediments; (vii) iron supply from above aeolian dust input; (viii) several chemical forms of iron in surface waters; (ix) certification of iron data in the oceans.