The computational model demonstrates trophic interactions and validates population dynamics in plankton communities, indicating its utility for marine ecologists.
The Nutrient-Unicellular-Multicellular (NUM) model is a trait-based model of unicellular and multicellular plankton that uses body size as the main structuring variable for community composition. The distinguishing feature is that body size is used for structuring predator-prey interactions and to scale all parameters. For unicellular plankton, trophic strategies across the full range from osmotrophy, phototrophy, phagotrophy and mixotrophy, are an emergent outcome of the model. Another distinguishing feature is that the multicellular component, represented by copepods, includes ontogeny, which is crucial in shaping population dynamics. In addition, the framework encompasses a nutrient pool consisting of nitrogen, silica and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) which interacts dynamically with the plankton community in three model setups: a chemostat simulating the photic zone, a water-column, and a global setup. Here we present a user-friendly Fortran-Matlab library which makes the NUM model accessible as a practical tool for marine ecologists or biogeochemical modellers. The model output is validated with in situ and satellite data and demonstrates its applicability in chemostat, water-column, and global setups.
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Papapostolou et al. (2025) studied this question.
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