Week 5

The Corvallis trip was well worth it. If not just experiencing American Dream's pizza (thanks again Michelle for the itp), what I learned and experienced with Yvette was amazing.

I had done some work similar to this in a math modeling class I took last semester and I really liked it then. Basically we looked at equations somebody else had created detailing the interactions between two populations, and we had to interpret each term in terms of the biology of the model. What I got to do with Yvette was the opposite: we looked at the biology and interpreted it in terms of a mathematical model - a system of differential equations to be exact.

This is the sort of thing I really love doing; I guess I'm always a mathematician at heart no matter what. We looked at the traditional forms of the NNPZD (a modified Nutrient-Phytoplankton-Zooplankton model that splits up Nutrients into NO3 and NH4 and includes Detritus as well) and got it working using Yvette's Matlab code for numerical solutions. Then we completely rewrote it in terms of the myrionecta rubra and cryptophyte algae. In doing so we came up with coding schemes to attempt to simulate seasonal changes in nutrient input in the system among other things.

Sadly it's difficult to really know whether a certain iteration of the model is on the right track or not because we don't have all of the 10+ constants that need to be determined from lab studies. The internship is set to have me obtain about 3-4 of them, so there will still be work to be done. For now the best we can do is look towards outside literature and try and find other lab data that applies to this system as closely as possible (still going to be a rather large approximation), but it should at least be in the ballpark.