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Gulf of Urabá (Caribbean Colombia), a Tropical Estuary: A Review with Some General Lessons About How it Works

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Abstract

Estuaries are highly diverse ecosystems that occur at the interface between land and sea and thus possess a high degree of environmental variation over short spatial and temporal scales. The Gulf of Urabá (1800 km 2; mean depth ~ 40 m) is a semiclosed estuarine area located in the southwestern part of the Caribbean Sea (South America). This large coastal–estuarine ecosystem operates as a biogeochemical reactor due to it featuring examples of high nutrient concentrations on the surface (NO 3- = 1619 μM; NO 2- = 0.505 μM; NH 4+  = 2.938 μM; PO 4 3- = 7.603 μM), high Chl α (max = 30.17; min = 0.02; mean = 9 mg m−3), as well as blooms of toxic algae, mostly Pseudo-nitzschia pseudodelicatissima. An outbreak of Tripos fusus causes bioluminescence and about 20 events of hypoxia (< 2–4 mg O 2 L−1) within a time series of 10 years. Despite this, information regarding the biological and biogeochemical oceanography (chlorophyll α, biomass, planktonic composition, nutrient cycling, mass balance of elements, and interannual variability) remains non-existent. Therefore, elucidating an ecosystem’s thresholds for various features is necessary for managing marine ecosystems, and especially for climate change projections. We here present a review of the functioning of this estuary, evaluating and reviewing each aspect of oceanographic variability.

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Source: REDCAM database

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Data availability

Data are available in/from:

REDCAM – For temperature, salinity, oxygen and pH data.

IDEAM – For river flow, precipitation and evaporation data.

CMEMS – For Chlorophyll and marine currents data.

ERA 5 – For wind speed data.

OCA – For temperature, salinity and density data (profiles).

Phytoplankton data are not openly available because they are being used for an identification catalog under construction.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the research group OCE (Oceans, climate, and Environment) of Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia) for the supply of instruments and technicians during the study. Also, we are thankful to IDEAM for their database and to the Marine and Coastal Research Institute—INVEMAR and CORPOURABÁ for providing the REDCAM database. The authors thank the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service for providing current data (CMEMS), available online at https://marine.copernicus.eu/, and express thanks to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather (ECMWF) for providing the ERA-5 wind reanalysis, available at https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-reanalysis, and the European Space Agency (ESA) for the production and distribution of the Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative dataset, Version 3.1, available online at http://www.oceancolour.org/ (Pawlowicz 2020).We would also like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions about the original manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ocean, Climate and Environment Research Group, Environmental Academic Corporation, University of Antioquia, Turbo, 052038, Colombia

    Sebastián Contreras-Fernández, Lennin Florez-Leiva, María Camila Bernal-Sánchez, Wilberto Pacheco-Paternina, Shalenys Bedoya-Valestt & Lorenzo Portillo-Cogollo

  2. Marine Environmental Quality Program, Institute of Marine and Coastal Research “José Benito Vives de Andréis” Invemar, Santa Marta, 47008, Colombia

    Sebastián Contreras-Fernández

  3. Marine and Coastal Geosciences Program, Institute of Marine and Coastal Research–INVEMAR, Santa Marta, 47008, Colombia

    María Camila Bernal-Sánchez, Wilberto Pacheco-Paternina & Lorenzo Portillo-Cogollo

  4. Centro de Investigaciones Sobre Desertificación, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CIDE-CSIC), Moncada, 46113, Spain

    Shalenys Bedoya-Valestt

  5. Biotechnology Group, Exact Sciences Faculty, University of Antioquia, Turbo, 052038, Colombia

    Lorenzo Portillo-Cogollo

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Contreras-Fernández, S., Florez-Leiva, L., Bernal-Sánchez, M.C. et al. Gulf of Urabá (Caribbean Colombia), a Tropical Estuary: A Review with Some General Lessons About How it Works. Ocean Sci. J. 57, 556–575 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12601-022-00093-9

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