By OCAdmin in Research highlights on

The 2^nd KU-NTU Colloquium is dedicated to promote academic collaboration for researchers between the KU and NTU. In the colloquium on June 15 2020, the Institute of Oceanography (IO) hosted two parallel sessions on oceanography sciences: physical oceanography and marine ecology. The theme for physical oceanography was “responses of shelf seas to coastal buoyancy inputs”, and that for marine ecology was “comparative studies of marine lives across latitudes”. Both parallel sessions were held in the form of on-line meetings (meeting agenda are available at: https://www.ntu-kyushu.ntu.edu.tw/parallel-session-07).

Physical Oceanography – Responses of shelf seas to coastal buoyancy inputs

Chairs: Dr. Shih-Nan Chen (IO NTU) and Dr. Shinichiro Kida (KU) 

River plumes form when river empties into coastal oceans. Upon entering the coastal oceans, the buoyant riverine water shoals, spread, and turns, typically retaining some of the buoyant fluid in a recirculating bulge near the source while the rest continues to propagate along a coast as a coastal current.These features are ubiquitous. Collectively, they carry over one-third of land-based precipitation to the ocean, serve as major conduits for terrestrial materials, and provide buoyancy forcing for coastal circulation and stratification.

Almost exclusively, studies on river plumes have focus on their surface expression: That is, to study how buoyant water spreads and mixes with the ambients. In this session, we will focus on the responses of the ambient environment: the shelf and slope water beneath/seaward of the buoyant fluid, which are often assumed to be featureless and motionless. We will discuss under what conditions and how a surface-concentrated river plume can set the shelf seas into motion.

​Marine Ecology – Comparative studies of marine lives across latitudes

Chairs: Dr. Hui-Yu Wang (IO NTU) and Dr. Seiji Arakaki (AMBL KU)

Climate change will impact the ocean environments, leading to changes in the marine biota. For example, rising temperature over time has provoked changes in body size and range shifts for some tropical and temperate fishes. Due to lacking long-term monitoring data, however, such climate impacts remains largely unknown for vast portions of subtropical marine ecosystems.

A latitudinal comparative design, representing a spatial layout of environmental changes such as temperature, could provide insight into the effects of environmental changes on marine organisms. For example, the archipelago in the northwestern Pacific, including Taiwan, the Okinawa archipelago, and the coast of mid- and lower Kyushu, Japan, span across the tropical-subtropical-temperate climate zones and encompass a wide range of environmental conditions. Also, a plethora of biological survey data are available in this region, providing a great opportunity to investigate the environmental effects on various marine lives.

In this session, we provided an overview about the ongoing biological research projects in the northwestern Pacific archipelago, contributed by researchers from the Amakusa Marine Biological Laboratory of Kyushu University (AMBL KU) and the Institute of Oceanography of National Taiwan University (IO NTU). This session included 7 research presentations and a joint discussion about developing collaborative projects. Subjects of these presentations included diversity and community structure of zooplankton and common intertidal fishes and population ecology for exploited and reef fishes. Through presentations and discussion, we aimed to combine our knowledge bases of population and community ecology, improving understanding of climate impacts on the subtropical marine biota.

Physical oceanography: study theme and photos of PIs

Marine ecology: field work and photos of PIs