Summer Production of Copepods in the Barents Sea

摘要

The production potential is one of the most important characteristic of an ecosystem. The community production reflects the efficiency of the use of the incident solar energy. It is necessary to know the production rate in marine ecosystems not only to draw the general scheme of their functioning, but also to predict the changes in the target stocks. The Barents Sea is one of the most productive seas of the world ocean characterized by concentration of some valuable species of fish, such as cod, haddock, and capelin. The high abundance of commercially valuable hydrobionts is largely determined by mass growth of plankton. To date, there are numerous data on the distribution of the zooplankton biomass, whereas almost no estimate of the production has been published. Copepods dominate zooplankton communities of the Barents Sea throughout the year. The purpose of this study was to estimate the spatial variation of the copepod production rate in summer.