Hiya - As a zooplankton person this is quite simple using length to weight relationships. But I'm trying to figure out the approximate carbon weight of a phytoplankton that is for example 20 um. Are there length-weight relationships for phyotplankton too? Is it possible in the absence of chlorophyll-a and species data?
Yes, people frequently use measured dimensions along one or two axes and simplified geometric shapes to estimate biovolume, see e.g. this one:
Hillebrand H, Dürselen C-D, Kirschtel D, Pollingher U, Zohary T (1999) Biovolume Calculation for Pelagic and Benthic Microalgae 1. J Phycol 35:403–424
...and then to convert from biovolume to biomass use for example:
Menden-Deuer S, Lessard EJ (2000) Carbon to volume relationships for dinoflagellates, diatoms, and other protist plankton. Limnol Oceanogr 45:569–579
hope this helps
-Leni
I started with biovolume to do this, as we would for zooplankton, but then struggled to find the final conversion - so thank you for this reference!
Lian
There is significant uncertainty over carbon conversion factors for prokaryotic picophytoplankton derived from uncertainties in both, size and carbon density estimates (DuRand et al. 2001; Shalapyonok et al. 2001). In this study (Soria-Piriz et al 2017), a conversion factor of 0.235 pg C um-3 was used for prokaryotic
phytoplankton, which is an average of CHN (carbon : hydrogen : nitrogen ratio) measurements for the cyanobacteria of interest: Synechococcus sp. and Prochlorococcus sp., as determined by other studies (Shalapyonok et al.
2001; Worden et al. 2004).
For calculating biovolume I'm always very happy with http://www.planktonforum.eu/index.php?id=37&no_cache=1.
Hi, Lian, it is possible to recalculate volume into carbon but it will not be so accurate. But for mega assessment it is possible to do. Some ideas about transformation of Organic matter you can find in my book
Book From energy budget of small hydrobionts to the flow of energ...
and some Chapters are translated into English. As well look, please, the famous book of Prof. Alimov (page 18-20). I translated for you 1 paragraph from page 18:
The production of plankton can be expressed in various equivalent units. When moving from one unit to another is, as mentioned above, the energy equivalent of oxygen during the oxidation of organic substances of mixed composition equal to 14.2 j/mg Oh, and also that organic matter contains 41% of the carbon in its mass. In this case 2.15 mg organic matter (OM) with 1 mg of carbon. The average values of PC = 0.85 and AK=1,18 transition coefficients have the following values: 3,15 mg O2 /mg C, 44,77 j/mg, and 0.69 mg OM/mg O2.
I hope this help,
Andrey
Moberg and Sosik (2012) might also be helpful for phytoplankton biovolume calculations - Article Distance maps to estimate cell volume from two-dimensional p...
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