Robert Izett

My PhD thesis focuses on deriving estimates of marine net community production (NCP) at high-resolution scales in the NE Pacific and Arctic Ocean. Net community production is a useful ecological metric that quantifies the balance between gross photosynthesis, and community-wide (i.e. heterotrophic and autotrophic) respiration in the ocean. As such, it represents the metabolic state of an ocean region, and helps to modulate key marine ecosystem services by, for example, setting upper limits on the ocean’s capacity for CO2 removal from the atmosphere and fisheries production. My research focuses on understanding the distribution of NCP on broad spatial and temporal scales. To achieve this, I combine a variety of approaches, including ship-based autonomous, underway sampling, chemical analyses, and modeling and statistical techniques. A key goal of my work is to produce a series of tools for deriving high-resolution, broad-coverage estimates of NCP, so that its distribution can be related to variability in climatic indices and fisheries production in the NE Pacific and Arctic Ocean.