Effects of solar irradiance noise on a complex marine trophic web

Abstract

The analysis of experimental data of the solar irradiance, collected on the marine surface, clearly highlights the intrinsic stochasticity of such an environmental parameter. Given this result, effects of randomly fluctuating irradiance on the population dynamics of a marine ecosystem are studied on the basis of the stochastic 0-dimensional biogeochemical flux model. The noisy fluctuations of the irradiance are formally described as a multiplicative Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, that is a self-correlated Gaussian noise. Nonmonotonic behaviours of the variance of the marine populations' biomass are found with respect to the intensity and the autocorrelation time of the noise source, manifesting a noise-induced transition of the ecosystem to an out-of-equilibrium steady state. Moreover, evidence of noise-induced effects on the organic carbon cycling processes underlying the food web dynamics are highlighted. The reported results clearly show the profound impact the stochastic environmental variables can have on both the populations and the biogeochemistry at the basis of a marine trophic network.