Ferderer et al. (2022): Assessing the influence of ocean alkalinity enhancement on a coastal phytoplankton community
Aaron Ferderer, Zanna Chase, Fraser Kennedy, Kai G. Schulz, Lennart Thomas Bach IN: Biogeosciences Discuss. [preprint], in review, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2022-17
To investigate the influence of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) on phytoplankton communities the authors enclosed a natural plankton community from coastal Tasmania for 22 days in nine microcosms during a spring bloom. They found that OAE had significant but generally moderate effects on various groups in the phytoplankton community and on heterotrophic bacteria, but state that the inadvertent effects of increased alkalinity on the coastal phytoplankton communities appear to be justifiable, relative to the enormous climatic benefit of increasing the inorganic carbon sink of seawater by 21 %.