Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Lecture Notes on Coastal and Estuarine Studies Series, Volume 8.

When I was asked to organize this symposium on marine productivity, it made me reflect on what aspects of this subject would be stimulating to a heterogeneous group of laboratory-oriented physiologists and biochemists. In recent years there have been several books which discusses the methodology commonly used in primary production studies and described the magnitude of photosynthetic CO₂ reduction in various areas of the world's oceans. I therefore decided to dispense with these conventional aspects of primary production and invite researchers to speak on a variety of problems relating the abundance and activity of phytoplankton to environmental conditions. The lectures I invited were thus quite diverse in character, but all were related either to factors affecting the rate of photosynthesis or to the fate of reduced carbon as it passes through the microbial food web.