Thema: Zooming in on Climate Change: Assessing the importance of biological buffering of environmental stress with the decreasing temporal and spatial scales

Acronym

Climate Change

Kurzbeschreibung

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

Oktober 2014

Ende

September 2017

Bewilligungssumme (gesamt)

15000

Bewilligungssumme (GEOMAR)

300000

Zuwendungsgeber / Programm

Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft / Impuls- und Vernezungsfonds

Koordination

null

Kontakt

Christian Pansch