META‐ANALYSIS OF MARINE NUTRIENT‐ENRICHMENT EXPERIMENTS: VARIATION IN THE MAGNITUDE OF NUTRIENT LIMITATION

Nutrient bioassay experiments have been performed in many marine and estuarine environments around the world. Although protocols have been relatively uniform, these experiments have yielded mixed results, implicating nitrogen, phosphorus, silica, iron, and several other elements as factors limiting phytoplankton growth. Meta-analysis has the potential to explain much of this variation by exploring the relationship between the magnitude of limitation and various environmental characteristics. We quantified limitation with a simple metric, Δr, that estimates the change in the per unit growth rate of phytoplankton directly attributable to addition of a specific nutrient, such as nitrogen, iron, or phosphorus. Preliminary analyses indicated that experiments lasting ≤1 d exhibited time lags in the numerical response of phytoplankton to nutrient addition, while experiments lasting >7 d confounded nutrient limitation with processes such as increased grazing or depletion of other nutrients. Thus, we restricted th...

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