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. 2020 Nov 27;11:6048. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19875-7

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 4 — Synthesis of carbon export values (from the epipelagic towards the mesopelagic zone) and sequestration (from the mesopelagic towards the bathypelagic zone) of particulate organic carbon (POC, green arrows) flux, active flux due to migrant zooplankton, and micronekton (red arrows), and estimated dissolved organic carbon (DOC, orange arrows) flux (as 20% of POC flux, see text). Values are given in gC m⁻² y⁻¹, to compare values in oligotrophic (left panel) and productive systems (right panel). POC and active fluxes are higher in productive zones, as expected, but active export flux is proportionally higher in productive zones as recently observed in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic Ocean⁹. Values of prokaryote and zooplankton respiration are also higher than POC, DOC, and active fluxes for both export and sequestration. Active sequestration flux is, at present, unknown (reflected by a question mark in both panels) and it should also explain, at least in part, the higher respiration rates in the bathypelagic zones. Finally, active sequestration flux and respiration by macrozooplankton and micronekton should tend to balance the budget (see text), and they are also represented as question marks in the Figure.