Ocean-scale patterns in community respiration rates along continuous transects across the Pacific Ocean.

Abstract

Community respiration (CR) of organic material to carbon dioxide plays a fundamental role in ecosystems and ocean biogeochemical cycles, as it dictates the amount of production available to higher trophic levels and for export to the deep ocean. Yet how CR varies across large oceanographic gradients is not well-known: CR is measured infrequently and cannot be easily sensed from space. We used continuous oxygen measurements collected by autonomous gliders to quantify surface CR rates across the Pacific Ocean. CR rates were calculated from changes in apparent oxygen utilization and six different estimates of oxygen flux based on wind speed. CR showed substantial spatial variation: rates were lowest in ocean gyres (mean of 6.93 mmol m(-3) d(-1)±8.0 mmol m(-3) d(-1) standard deviation in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre) and were more rapid and more variable near the equator (8.69 mmol m(-3) d(-1)±7.32 mmol m(-3) d(-1) between 10°N and 10°S) and near shore (e.g., 5.62 mmol m(-3) d(-1)±45.6 mmol m(-3) d(-1) between the coast of California and 124°W, and 17.0 mmol m(-3) d(-1)±13.9 mmol m(-3) d(-1) between 156°E and the Australian coast). We examined how CR varied with coincident measurements of temperature, turbidity, and chlorophyll concentrations (a proxy for phytoplankton biomass), and found that CR was weakly related to different explanatory variables across the Pacific, but more strongly related to particular variables in different biogeographical areas. Our results indicate that CR is not a simple linear function of chlorophyll or temperature, and that at the scale of the Pacific, the coupling between primary production, ocean warming, and CR is complex and variable. We suggest that this stems from substantial spatial variation in CR captured by high-resolution autonomous measurements.