C3 seminar: Marine Productivity and the Biological Pump

Title: Marine Productivity and the Biological Pump: Past, Present and Future

Speaker: Emeritus Professor John Raven, School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, UK

John A Raven FRS FRSE is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Dundee where he has been researching and teaching since 1971 after a BA (1963) and PhD (1967) in Botany from the University of Cambridge where he also did postdoctoral work and was a fixed-term lecturer (1968-1971). He has published more than 360 peer-reviewed papers and over 50 book chapters, has authored one book (J A Raven 1984 Energetics and Transport in Aquatic Plants, A R Liss, New York USA) and co-authored another (P G Falkowski and J A Raven 1997 Aquatic Photosynthesis, Blackwell Science, Maldon USA) which is now in a second edition (2007 Princeton University Press, Princeton USA). John was chair of the panel that produced the Royal Society of London report on Ocean Acidification due to increasing Carbon Dioxide in 2005. He has published on how aquatic (marine and freshwater) photosynthetic organisms acquire inorganic carbon, and their response to altered carbon dioxide and pH as well as to variations in light and available nitrogen, phosphorus and iron, since 1968. His current research in the area of ocean acidification concerns cell and organism level studies of how aquatic photosynthetic organisms acquire inorganic carbon by diffusion of CO2 and by using CO2 concentrating mechanisms, and how this is influenced by the supply of other resources that are altered by environmental change.  Other areas of John’s current research range from how photosynthetic light harvesting and photochemical reactions evolved and accommodate to organisms of different optical thickness, through colonization of the land by photosynthetic organisms in the Palaeozoic to photosynthetic aspects of astrobiology.