Abstract:
Zooplankton plays a fundamental role in the estuarine food web. Thus, understanding
the factors that affect the distribution of estuarine zooplankton is of major concern
for the management of estuaries. An integrated modeling approach, coupling a
hydrodynamics and an ecological model, is presented here to simulate the threedimensional
dynamics of zooplankton. The hydrodynamics is computed with
SELFE, a 3D baroclinic circulation model. The ecological model is based on an
extension of EcoSim 2.0, which allows the simulation of several ecological state
variables, to account for zooplankton dynamics. Some test cases are presented that
validate the changes made in the EcoSim 2.0 and the integration of the
hydrodynamic and ecological models. A sensitivity analysis is also performed to
check the influence of the input parameters of the ecological model in the final
results, showing the phytoplankton’s temperature-dependent growth parameters as
the most important, for phytoplankton, inorganic nutrients and DIC pools