Pelagic plankton net community production and respiration in the Sea of Marmara

---

Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Deniz Bilimleri Enstitüsü, Deniz Biyolojisi Ve Balıkçılık Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2023

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: MELİKE KAZAK

Asıl Danışman (Eş Danışmanlı Tezler İçin): Mustafa Yücel

Eş Danışman: Asım Mustafa Mantıkcı

Özet:

Respiration is a critical process in biological pump with primary production. This study quantified net community production (NCP) and community respiration (CR) for stations selected from various locations in the Sea of Marmara for the March 2022 and June 2022 seasons. NCP and CR experiments were conducted as in-vitro bottle incubations at in-situ temperature using a relatively new tool in aquatic science: OPTODES (fiber optical oxygen sensors). One of the essential aspects of this study is community respiration samples were taken from different depths from both euphotic zone and sub-halocline to represent water column community respiration. In general, CR had a decreasing pattern with depth and it was positively correlated with dissolved oxygen and particulate organic carbon. For the euphotic zone, in March 2022, the hourly CR rate was in the range of 0.01-2.05 μmol O₂ L^-1 h^-1 and in June 2022, it was in the range of 0.01-1.63 μmol O₂ L^-1 h^-1. Sub-halocline community respiration rates calculated as 89 ± 111mg C m^-3 day^-1 for March, 2022 and 75 ± 35 mg C m^-3 day^-1 for June, 2022. Spatial differences of hourly NCP rates found to be positively correlated with dissolved oxygen and Chl-a. When the daily NCP for the Sea of Marmara is roughly calculated, the system found to be heterotrophic especially in less productive seasons.