The Darwin Model

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The Darwin Model Project is an initiative and alliance among scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to use advanced physical models of global circulation coupled with models of microbial processes. Since 2007, the ultimate goal of the project is to push the boundaries of blending the physical, chemical, and biological models with biological life genomes of the ocean, given global ocean physics and chemical makeup.

Developing and creating theoretical and numerical models of marine ecosystems is a main part. The models help the scientists understand the differences in the type and location of the microbe communities, as well as helping them explore their role in climate change. Some other topics that the models are attributing to are advances in plankton diversity, nitrogen fixation, top-down control or predation consumption by layers, mixotrophy, and macromolecular modeling. The project has been known to model as much as 78 different types of phytoplankton spanning from 0.6-200 micrometers.

From 2007-2012, the group at MIT made the most improvements to their models. Since then, there has been a vast amount of research and publications completed. The project is rapidly expanding and growing in scientist members and contributions made from NASA and the NSF, just to name a few. Physical Oceanographers, Biogeochemists, and Marine Microbiologists are being sought after for their efforts in the Darwin Model Project, the future of modeling marine organisms.

Figure 1: A snapshot from the project’s modeling efforts. Amongst the four different types of plankton inputted into the model, colder colors represent the smaller microbes and warmer colors represent the larger microbes.

References

Anne Willem Omta, Elizabeth A. Heiny, Harshana Rajakaruna, David Talmy, Michael J. Follows (2023), Trophic model closure influences ecosystem response to enrichment, Ecological Modelling, doi: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2022.110183

MIT The Darwin Model Project Website (2023), https://darwinproject.mit.edu/

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