Area of research
Oceanography · Ecology
Research interest
Research topics from publications: Microbial communities associated with sinking particles across an environmental gradient from coastal upwelling to the oligotrophic ocean; Relating sinking and suspended microbial communities in the California Current Ecosystem: digestion resistance and the contributions of phytoplankton taxa to export. Representative work: We used 16S, 18S, plastid and internal transcribed spacer (for Synechococcus strains) sequencing to quantify relative microbial abundances in water-column samples and on sediment-trap-collected particles across an environmental gradient in the California Current Ecosystem (CCE) spanning a > 60-fold range of surface chlorophyll. Most mixed-layer dominant eukaryotes and prokaryotes were consistently underrepresented on sinking particles. Diatoms were the only phototrophic taxa consistently overrepresented. Even within this class, however, one genus (Thalassiosira) was a particle-enriched dominant, while a similarly abundant species was poorly represented. Synechococcus was significantly enrich