A. Project Summary Many scientific papers have been written that detail environmental changes in the Black Sea, and many speculate on the implications of further potential anthropogenic changes 1) in various drainage basins that provide freshwater to this sea, 2) along its coastal margins, and 3) in extraction of its resources. While the ecological effects of industrial activity and changing land and water use are most apparent in coastal regions of the Black Sea, they are also evident off-shore. For example, the observed trend of increasing nutrient concentrations and doublings of both phytoplankton biomass and primary productivity throughout the central region of the sea between the mid 1970s and early 1990s, have been attributed to anthropogenic causes. Perhaps the most dramatic basin-wide changes have been associated with the accidental introductions of carnivorous gelatinous zooplankton, most recently Mnemiopsis leydii. These species have profoundly affected Black Sea community structure. Many aspects of the Black Sea ecosystem make it an attractive system for biological oceanographers to study. Major food web perturbations allow for testing of hypotheses relating to the influence of community organization and on the flow of energy and matter. Basin scale physical processes are becoming increasingly well known, and the physical scale of this sea allows for realistic state of the art linkages among physical and biological processes in contemporary modeling efforts. The foremost of these models are nitrogen based, and they lead to conjecture regarding the sources of nitrogen that drive plankton production. However, there have been no actual studies of the dynamics of the annual nitrogen cycle and, in particular, no determinations of new production in the Black Sea. Moreover, generalizations that have been made, such as in models, are predicated upon the generalizable behavior of a Black Sea planktonic ecosystem prior to the environmental changes of the last decade. In conjunction with colleagues in Turkey, Dr. McCarthy has developed a plan to fill these gaps in knowledge of the dynamics of the nitrogen cycle in the euphoric zone of the Black Sea. Rates of N uptake, N2 fixation, and nitrogen flux among dissolved components will be measured with stable isotope techniques and interpreted within the context of plankton community and geophysical structure. This study will serve to document current conditions, provide a basis for inferring the effects of recent environmental changes, and contribute to more realistic modeling efforts of the Black Sea ecosystem. This proposed collaboration responds to an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the openwater nitrogen cycle in the Black Sea very efficiently. Turkish scientists at the METU Institute of Marine Science have just launched an intensive program to study the "Dynamics of the lower trophic levels of the Black Sea: Biogeochemical processes, and system modeling". The first field campaign in this program has begun, but a critical component, the dynamics of nitrogen fluxes among nutrient and particulate pools and trophic levels is missing. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will provide this critical component.
