Ecoinformatics Problems of the World Ocean - New Ecoinformatics Tools in Environmental Science: Applications and Decision-making - page 259

In the late 20th century an urgent problem of predicting the dynamics of the
ocean systems in conditions of increasing anthropogenic impacts (chemical poi-
soning, mechanical liquidation of living organisms, environmental changes) as well
as assessing their role in the dynamics of the whole biosphere arose. So, recent
studies of the climatic impact of greenhouse gases have shown that the role of the
World Ocean in this process has been underestimated. In particular, according to
Kondratyev and Johannessen (1993) and which concern the role of the arctic basins
of the World Ocean in the formation of the global CO 2 cycle, previous assessments
of this role were incorrect. This is connected with the fact that an account of
biological and gravitational processes playing the combined role of a pump that
pumps carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to deep layers of the ocean was
inadequate in the earlier models of the global biogeochemical carbon cycle.
Therefore, speci

ed models of the working regime for this pump with climatic
zones taken into account may play an important role in predicting estimates of the
greenhouse effect.
The impact of the ocean ecosystems on the biogeochemical cycles is manifested
through the atmosphere-water border and is usually parameterized based on the
observational data. However, in this impact the vertical structure of the processes
taking place in the ocean medium is very important. The nature of these processes
depends much on external factors. For instance, according to Legendre and
Legendre (1998), in the arctic zones of the World Ocean the patchy structure of the
springtime blossoming of phytoplankton is determined by the winter conditions of
ice formation and the subsequent ice melting. In other zones, these external factors
are pollution of the atmosphere and ocean surface, changes in the phytoplankton
living conditions and functioning of the carbonate system.
Phytoplankton is at one of the initial stages of the trophic hierarchy of the ocean
system. As field observations have shown, the World Ocean has a patchy structure

formed by a combination of non-uniform spatial distributions of insolation level,
temperature, salinity, concentration of nutrient elements, hydrodynamic character-
istics, etc. The vertical structure of the phytoplankton distribution is less diverse and
possesses rather universal properties. These properties are manifested through the
existence of one-to-four vertical maxima of phytoplankton biomass.
The variability of the patchy topology and vertical structure is connected with
seasonal cycles and has been well studied experimentally in many climatic zones of
the World Ocean. The typical qualitative and quantitative indicators of this vari-
ability have been found. The combined distributions of abiotic, hydrological, and
biotic components of the ocean ecosystems have been studied.
The complexity and mutual dependence of all the processes in the ocean sub-
stantially hinder the uncovering of the laws of formation of phytoplankton spots and
establishing the correlations between various factors of regulating the trophic
relationships intensity in the ocean ecosystems. For instance, many studies revealed
a close relationship between primary production and phytoplankton amount. At the
same time, this relationship gets broken depending on a combination of the synoptic
situation and insolation. It turns out that an extent of breaking depends much on a
combination of the groups of phytoplankton (Legendre and Legendre 1998).