Sarah Le Besque

The remote biomes of the Southern Ocean are highly under-sampled and our understanding of how the community structure and physiology of phytoplankton evolves over the seasonal cycle is poorly known. This weakens our ability to accurately predict how the productivity of the Southern Ocean will respond under climate change. My current research uses in-situ datasets of fluorescence, pigments, and absorption to understand how phytoplankton community structure changes seasonally and latitudinally in the Southern Ocean, particularly under High Nutrient, Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) conditions. My work also includes assessing which environmental factors drive these changes, focusing on nutrient availability, water-column stratification, and light within the surface mixed layer.