The role of temperature, cellular quota and nutrient concentrations for photosynthesis, growth and light–dark acclimation in phytoplankton

The quantitative description of phytoplankton growth, dynamic photoacclimation and photosynthesis in dependence on temperature, irradiance, trace element and nutrient availability is still a matter of debate and competing ideas in the literature, mainly due to a lack of new critical experiments and to non-unique mathematical descriptions. This paper presents a closed theory of the above processes in a mathematically unique language. Notions like balanced and rapid growth, lower and upper compensation points are defined precisely and combined with successful validations of the system of equations against laboratory experiments and field observations taken from the literature. The minimum number of parameters of the present model of growth in dependence on light, temperature and one nutrient is 16 whereby 5 of them seem to have universal (species-independent) values.