The current state of knowledge stems from a rich literature on the taxonomy, growth characteristics, and ecophysiology of freshwater and marine phytoplankton collectively grouped as “harmful algae”. A fundamental challenge to HAB scientists is to identify key indicators and demonstrated relationships that reveal solid evidence of climate-induced changes in harmful algal blooms. Scientists are left mostly to “informed” speculation about whether future climate may enhance or diminish the frequency, intensity, and distribution of HAB outbreaks. But the anticipated linkages between climate change and harmful algal blooms are founded on limited and often conflicting experimental and observational data. There is increasing concern that this shifting milieu will cause changes in phytoplankton community structure and composition, including a greater prevalence and geographical spread of harmful algal blooms. The proximal changes, manifest primarily in terms of temperature, precipitation, and wind, work interactively with surface water acidification stemming from increased CO 2 emissions to alter mean surface water conditions, and perhaps more importantly their extremes. The warming of the global system is unequivocal and has resulted in unprecedented changes in climate, meaning decadal or longer time scale shifts in overall weather characteristics ( Stocker et al., 2013). These and other fundamental changes in HAB research will be necessary if HAB science is to obtain compelling evidence that climate change has caused alterations in HAB distributions, prevalence or character, and to develop the theoretical, experimental, and empirical evidence explaining the mechanisms underpinning these ecological shifts. From a broader perspective, the nexus of HAB science and the social sciences of harmful algal blooms is inadequate and prevents quantitative assessment of impacts of future HAB changes on human well-being. Forecasting changes in HAB patterns over the next few decades will depend critically upon considering harmful algal blooms within the competitive context of plankton communities, and linking these insights to ecosystem, oceanographic and climate models. A subset of observer sites is recommended to help develop stronger linkages among global, national, and regional climate change and HAB observation programs, providing fundamental datasets for investigating global changes in the prevalence of harmful algal blooms. There is an absence of high quality time-series data in most regions currently experiencing HAB outbreaks, and little if any data from regions expected to develop HAB events in the future. Examples of some fundamental unknowns include how larger and more frequent extreme weather events may break down natural biogeographic barriers, how stratification may enhance or diminish HAB events, how trace nutrients (metals, vitamins) influence cell toxicity, and how grazing pressures may leverage, or mitigate HAB development. Despite the need to focus on keystone species, more studies need to address strain variability within species, their responses under multifactorial conditions, and the retrospective analyses of long-term plankton and cyst core data research topics that are departures from the norm.
#Transced nsf to pst manual
A HAB “best practices” manual would help foster more uniform research strategies and protocols, and selection of a small target list of model HAB species or isolates for study would greatly promote the accumulation of knowledge. There is a critical absence of tenable hypotheses for how climate pressures mechanistically affect HAB species, and the lack of uniform experimental protocols limits the quantitative cross-investigation comparisons essential to advancement. Moreover, current research strategies are not well suited to inform these fundamental linkages. Nonetheless there is only basic information to speculate upon which regions or habitats HAB species may be the most resilient or susceptible.
#Transced nsf to pst windows
There is expectation that harmful algal bloom (HAB) geographical domains should expand in some cases, as will seasonal windows of opportunity for harmful algal blooms at higher latitudes. Summarized here is the consensus of a recent workshop held to address what currently is known and not known about the environmental conditions that favor initiation and maintenance of harmful algal blooms. These pressures will be manifest as alterations in temperature, stratification, light, ocean acidification, precipitation-induced nutrient inputs, and grazing, but absence of fundamental knowledge of the mechanisms driving harmful algal blooms frustrates most hope of forecasting their future prevalence. Climate change pressures will influence marine planktonic systems globally, and it is conceivable that harmful algal blooms may increase in frequency and severity.