Brook Nunn
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Phytoplankton, the floating single-celled algae at the base of marine food webs, sometimes grow fast enough to form dense blooms. These blooms affect productivity of the whole food web, including coastal fisheries, and shape how the ocean takes up and stores carbon.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
phytoplankton blooms
marine bacteria
microbial interactions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Test whether daily (diel) metabolic schedules of chemical exchange among plankton persist in a dynamic coastal ecosystem, using diel time-series samples taken before, during and after blooms near Orcas Island, Washington.
- Identify biomolecules associated with bloom initiation, maintenance and cessation by applying genomic 'omics analyses and time-series multivariate statistics to the 2021-2022 phytoplankton and bacterial sample set.
- Characterize how phytoplankton-bacteria interactions and microbial community succession change over short (hours) and long (days to weeks) timescales across a bloom's life cycle.
More about the research
What controls when a bloom starts, holds steady and collapses? Nutrients matter, but so do the physical and chemical exchanges among phytoplankton cells and the bacteria living alongside them. In stable open-ocean waters, plankton are known to trade key chemicals on daily (diel) schedules. Whether such metabolic schedules operate in changeable coastal waters disturbed by blooms is unknown.
Why it matters
Knowing what triggers and ends phytoplankton blooms could help predict bloom timing in coastal waters, which would inform fisheries management since blooms fuel coastal food webs. Bloom-stage biomolecules identified here could also improve global models that forecast how phytoplankton affect ocean carbon sequestration, and guide where and when future ocean sampling should occur.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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