PRELIMINARY DATA ANALYSIS REPORT ON CARBON UPTAKE AND RELEASE BY WATER COLUMN PROCESSES

Project no: 036949 Project acronym: SESAME Project title: Southern European Seas: Assessing and Modelling Ecosystem changes Instrument: Integrated Project Thematic Priority: 6.3 Global Change and Ecosystems Deliverable 3.8.3 Preliminary data analysis report on Carbon uptake and release by water column processes Due date of deliverable: 30 April 2009 (T30) Actual submission date: 24 July 2009 Measurements of respiration rates are not yet routinely performed within marine biogeochemical surveys. The balance between the community respiration and photosynthesis (primary production) indicates the potential amount of photosynthetically fixed carbon available for export from the upper mixed layer. Three cruises have been carried out in the Cilician basin, in collaboration with IMS-METU, IRSA-CNR and Aegean/HCMR, from November 2007 to February 2009 to measure primary production, community respiration, bacterial C production and related physicochemical parameters in the column water. From preliminary results, we can deduce that this oligotrophic aquatic ecosystem supports a disproportionately high respiration rates. In particular we observed a significant shift toward catabolic functions in the offshore station. On the other hand community respiration rates observed in this study were in the range reported for other oligotrophic open ocean regions.