The Roles of Advection and In Situ Growth in Determining the Dynamics of Continental Shelf Zooplankton: High Frequency Measurements of Zooplankton Biomass Coupled with Measurements of Secondary Productivity in the Middle Atlantic Bight

Evaluation of the role of continental margins in planetary carbon cycles can be approached in various ways, with the extremes being knowledge generated either by large-scale studies of a few basic characteristics of the carbon cycle of shelves worldwide (comparative approach) or by temporally intensive studies of a few sites selected to typify contrasting processes. Mechanisms of cross-shelf transfer, for example, are presently of great interest and within the US there are at least four differing continental shelf environments in which cross-shelf processes are driven by storms (southern Bering Sea, northeastern US), by jets and eddies (northern California coast), by freshwater runoff (Bering Sea, Gulf of Mexico), and by frontal meanders and filaments of the Gulf Stream (southeastern US). Because the type and magnitude of the physical forcing, and its variability on an annual scale, are fundamental to the response of the carbon cycle, investigation of each of these shelves would offer insight useful to predictive global understanding of the carbon cycle on continental shelves