Plankton are the small plants and animals that form the base of aquatic ecosystems. Despite their diminutive size, they are extremely numerous and play a major role in global biogeochemistry, food production, and climate. Remarkably, plankton have a sufficient impact on aquatic optical properties that they can be detected from space. The first global record of the marine planktonic plants, called ‘phytoplankton’, was collected in the late 1970’s and was limited to a single property: the concentration of the photosynthetic pigment, chlorophyll. Remote sensing technology and our ability to interpret the measured signal have improved significantly since these first records of ocean chlorophyll. In this presentation, I will provide a ‘tour’ of some of the new insights gained about global marine plankton, their physiology, sensitivity to climate variations, and their intricate dance between predators and prey.
 
About the Speaker:

Michael Behrenfeld is a Professor at Oregon State University in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology. He received his Ph.D. in Oceanography from Oregon State in 1993. He then work as a Research Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in NY and then as an Assistant Professor of Research at Rutgers University. In 1999, Dr. Behrenfeld accepted a civil servant position at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center before taking his current position at OSU in 2005. Dr. Behrenfeld’s research bridges fundamental understandings in physiology and biochemistry with broad-scale understanding of biospheric functioning. Research topics include photobiology, plankton ecology, remote sensing and development of satellite sensors, optical approaches to ecological/physiological problems, biochemistry and biophysics of photosynthesis, and climate change impacts on marine plankton.

                   
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