Self-organization of Small-Scale Plankton Patchiness Described by Means of the Object-Based Model

The article presents a multi-species object-based model of a marine plankton community. The model was constructed using the synthesis of Lagrangian and Eulerian descriptions: we described the living components of an ecosystem by the individual-based approach and the non-living components (hydrochemical fields) – in a traditional way as concentrations in the nodes of a regular computational grid. A set of interacting objects simulated a plankton community. Each object modeled behavior of a group of identical plankters characterized by species, age, stage of development, biomass, abundance, and rates of physiological processes. Bioenergetic interaction between the objects and the environment was a source of population dynamics. We studied self-organization of plankton spatial distribution with no significant hydrophysical influences. Lloyd’s index of mean crowding, spectral and wavelet analyses were used to investigate patterns of simulated spatial variability. We compared spectra of simulated plankton patchiness with those estimated according to observation data collected by the Video Plankton Recorder (VPR).