Zooming in on Climate Change: Assessing the importance of biological buffering of environmental stress with the decreasing temporal and spatial scales
ACRONYM
Climate Change
Title
Zooming in on Climate Change: Assessing the importance of biological buffering of environmental stress with the decreasing temporal and spatial scales
General information
Climate change and human activities are having pervasive and lasting effects on shallow
marine coastal ecosystems. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels are causing acidification of the
oceans at rates that are 10-100 × faster than at any point in the last 53 million years, with
corresponding effects on biological and ecological processes. Observed responses to ocean
acidification are, however, highly variable among and within species and mechanisms
underlying these responses are only beginning to be understood. In most coastal habitats
seasonal acidification occurs naturally and goes along with short-term hypoxia, a research
field almost entirely lacking observations and experimental data. Acclimation (i.e. phenotypic
plasticity), and adaptation (i.e. intraspecific genetic diversity) are key traits that will influence
resilience of organisms to ocean acidification and hypoxia and hence the extent of future
ecosystem changes. Past research may have missed important aspects by focussing on simple
and static systems, single populations and single ontogenetic stages. Zooming in from the
scale of entire bays (10s of km) to algal blade surfaces (sub-mm) this project will quantify
different dimensions of natural habitat fluctuations and investigate the potential for different
ontogenetic stages of the barnacle Amphibalanus improvisus, to acclimate and to adapt to
near-future ocean acidification and hypoxia. The genetic diversity of different populations of
this species along the North Sea – Baltic Sea environmental gradient will be characterized and
will be correlated with natural pCO2/pO2 variability in those habitats. The proposed work will
provide the first available estimates of the adaptive potential of a marine invertebrate to
multiple climate change variables, and the first assessment of the importance of local habitat
fluctuations at different scales in creating adaptive potential.
Start
October, 2014
End
September, 2017
Funding (total)
15000
Funding (GEOMAR)
300000
Funding body / Programme
-
Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft
/ Impuls- und Vernezungsfonds
Coordination
null
Contact
