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Transient spatial patterns in plankton communities: Blooms and travelling waves of phytoplankton in estuaries. (English) Zbl 0663.92020

Mathematical ecology, Proc. Autumn Course Res. Semin., Miramare- Trieste/Italy 1986, 238-269 (1988).
[For the entire collection see Zbl 0659.00019.]
A two-layer model of phytoplankton growing in a stratified estuary exhibits travelling waves, capturing several of the dominant characteristics of estuarine blooms. Results are compared to measurements in South San Francisco Bay. The model in one horizontal dimension, x, incorporates light-limited growth, sinking, shear dispersion, advection, and vertical transfer between layers. The wave characteristics are sensitive to initial conditions. Steep, front-like shapes moving at the advective speed can develop from travelling waves if the initial conditions differ from the initial wave solution in the tail region of large x. Rapid collapse to the steep forms occurs when initial conditions allow the wave to be zero over a finite interval in x.

MSC:

92D40 Ecology
65C20 Probabilistic models, generic numerical methods in probability and statistics

Citations:

Zbl 0659.00019