Constructing end-to-end budgets for the Georges Bank ecosystem

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Oceanographic regimes on the continental shelf display a great range in the time scales of physical exchange, biochemical processes and trophic transfers. The close surface-toseabed physical coupling at intermediate scales –weeks to months – means that the open ocean paradigm of a relatively autonomous microbial loop is inadequate. But purely topdown trophic depictions are insufficient to constrain a system subject to physical forcing as well as fishing. These processes are found on most continental shelves but are particularly important on Georges Bank in the north-west Atlantic where the weeks-tomonths regime is dominant in relative area and in productivity.