Mathematical Modelling of Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Oxygen in a Plankton System

Oxygen production due to phytoplankton photosynthesis is a crucial phenomenon underlying the dynamics of marine ecosystems. However, most of the existing literature focus on other aspects of the plankton community functioning, thus leaving the issue of the coupled oxygen-plankton dynamics understudied. In this paper, we consider a generic model of the oxygen-phytoplankton-zooplankton dynamics to make an insight into the basic properties of the plankton-oxygen interactions. The model is analyzed both analytically and numerically. We first consider the nonspatial model and show that it predicts possible oxygen depletion under certain environmental conditions. We then consider the spatially explicit model and show that it exhibits a rich variety of spatiotemporal patterns including travelling fronts of oxygen depletion, dynamical stabilization of unstable equilibrium and spatiotemporal chaos.