Contact : Mar Benavides - MIO
The biological fixation of nitrogen (N2) by marine microbes known as "diazotrophs" supports around 50% of primary production in the ocean, stimulating the absorption of CO2 and mitigating climate change. The NOTION project (NitrOgen fixers structuring phyToplankton bIodiversity in the OceaN in the context of climate change), funded by the BNP Paribas Foundation for Climate and Biodiversity, aims to understand how climate change stressors affect the activity of diazotrophs and how they will affect the biodiversity and productivity of phytoplankton in the future ocean.
The project involves three experimental research groups (Mar Benavides and Alba Filella from the MIO, Lasse Riemann from the University of Copenhagen, and Maren Voss and Jacqueline Umbricht from the Leibniz Institut for Baltic Sea Research), who will produce data to improve the parameterisation of global biogeochemical and species distribution models developed by Nicolas Gruber's group (ETH Zurich).
