Towards a better integration of the sediment biogeochemistry in the modelling of the coastal systems

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, José Fortes
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/31133
• topic: Sediment biogeochemistry

Ecological models have been signficantly improved during the last decades, leading to more realistic predictions of coastal water processes under different forcing. Even though benthic sediments play an important role in biogeochemical processes occurring in the water column, in the past, very few modelling studies have taken into account these contributions. Recent efforts are being put into the implementation of coupled models, including the biogeochemistry processes occurring at both the upper benthic layer and the water column. This step is important, as along with the river supply, benthic nutrient regeneration can contribute significantly to the phytoplankton growth and the primary production. During the validation process, due to the important number of parameters involving these models, the application of Sensitivity Analysis for selecting the most important model parameters is highly needed. The importance of these processes and tools in the ecological modelling of coastal systems is discussed in this paper.