1. After Master thesis, I have been interested in study on how anthropogenic activities also natural change affect
environment and how to measure these effects. During oceanographic training programme, I understood that
phytoplankton is primary producer and plays important role in food chain and ecosystem. That was reason for
why I investigated how phytoplankton biomass changes under impacts of chronic oil pollution in independent
project of programme. There were three tasks in this project:
1. Phytoplankton model: Experiment on reaction of phytoplankton (Odontella Regia) to different oil
concentration was carried to understand relationship between phytoplankton biomass and oil
concentration. Experiment’s data was analyzed then fit to model to find appropriate equation. This was
done in R software.
2. Couple phytoplankton model and transport models: after phytoplankton model was defined, in order to
know how the biomass vary over space and time under impacts of pollution, an equation that integrate
physical process (transport by currents) and biological process (change in biomass) was set up. This
equation is also known as reactive-transport model. This equation was solve by a program written in R
3. Scenarios for German Bight: after model was developed and tested, four oil pollution scenarios were set
up to demonstrate how the model works.
[Nguyen Thi Thai Hoa – Researcher at Institute for Environment and Resources, HoChiMinh city, Vietnam – ngthaihoa@yahoo.com ]