When I was looking at peer reviewed articles for my papers
this year, there were several ones about dead zones. I was surprised to see that there were not as many as I thought there would be. Many of them
were from before 2005 so research on dead zones has been looked at for numerous
amounts of years. The peer reviewed article I chose to write about is by Andrew
H. Altieri and Keryn B. Gedan and is called Climate
Change and Dead Zones. It was published in 2015 and actually the only
article I saw that was published in the current year. This article is one of
the few I found that was about how climate change is a factor contributing to
dead zones. The majority of the ones I found focused more on what we do such as
fossil fuels and the nitrates and phosphates that accumulate due to over
fertilization from farms.
One point that Alteiri and Gedan make in this article is
that 94% of dead zones are located in regions that will have a 2° C temperature
increase by the end of the century. They have also found evidence that climate
variables such as temperature, ocean acidification, and precipitation will
affect dead zones and that each of these factors including others have the
ability to act on the oxygen availability along with the ecological responses
to hypoxia. This statement suggests that these factors work together to
exacerbate dead zones along with the obvious causes such as eutrophication.
One thing I thought was really interesting in this article
was a chart that shows the physical and biological effects and their specified
climate drivers (you can see it by going to the actual article). For example, one of the climate drivers was sea level rise and
the physical effect was stratification, nutrient loading, and the volume of
hypoxic water. For the biological effects, it included wetland filtration of
nutrients. These effects are the related effects of dead zones and helps drive
their point mentioned earlier that the climate variables all contribute in some
way to dad zones.
They also showed a model on the temperature effects on
hypoxia impacts. On one side it showed the drivers such as nutrients and
microbial decomposition and their effects with higher temperatures. On the
other side it showed the responses such as physiological stress and tolerance.
What helped the most was for each driver and response it had an explanation of
how it is affected with higher temperatures and I think it was an important
piece of information to put in the article.
This article really pinpoints the natural causes of dead
zones and makes the general public aware of their effects on dead zones. The
pictures and diagrams really helped, even for me being a biology major.
Altieri, A. H. and Gedan, K. B. (2015). Climate
change and dead zones. Global Change Biology,
21: 1395–1406.
doi: 10.1111/gcb.12754.
Pictures received from http://www.vims.edu/research/topics/_images/do_climate_change.jpg and
https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/11/10/Health-Environment-Science/Graphics/w-DeadZones.jpg?uuid=1YyxRmiJEeS6_WWYGSpEjQ
Looking at the peer reviewed journal, I started to think about the effect dead zones has on other things. For example, since animals either die or go somewhere else because of dead zones, how does this impact the fishing industry? The gulf of mexico is one of the biggest dead zones and is becoming bigger due to the increase use of fertilization from farmers during the spring time. If the fish either leave or die, the fishing industry should take a big hit in terms of productivity. This also reminds of a recent discovery of a dead zone in the atlantic ocean which is the first time that a dead zone has existed not from populated coastal areas.
ReplyDeleteI think that since biology encompasses so many different topics that all have the ability to become highly specialized, it is important to break things down a bit so that others can understand. I agree with you on your point that pictures and graphics are necessary for this purpose. I think that it is more likely, as mentioned above, that the factors above do all work together. If it were just one factor causing all of this damage, it would be easy to pinpoint and take care of, especially since research on this topic has been going on for over 10 years as you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI think that since biology encompasses so many different topics that all have the ability to become highly specialized, it is important to break things down a bit so that others can understand. I agree with you on your point that pictures and graphics are necessary for this purpose. I think that it is more likely, as mentioned above, that the factors above do all work together. If it were just one factor causing all of this damage, it would be easy to pinpoint and take care of, especially since research on this topic has been going on for over 10 years as you mentioned.
ReplyDelete