costal picture with sea and bedrock

Doctoral project: How are carbon flows in coastal ecosystems influenced by climate change?

A major knowledge-gap in science is how climate change will affect biochemical processes, biodiversity, and production in food webs. At the center of this knowledge-gap is our understanding of how carbon is sequestered, degraded, stored, circulated, and exported in ecosystems.

Project information

Doctoral student
Katerina Wagner
Supervisor
Samuel Hylander
Other project members
Mark Dopson, Anders Forsman, Marcelo Kretzer, Markus Franzén, Elin Lindehoff
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University
Financier
Linnaeus University
Timetable
1 March 2023–1 March 2027
Subject
Ecology (Department of Biology and Environmental Science, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences)

Födoväv för projektet
This graph shows different trophic levels within the Baltic Sea. The highlighted three are the trophic levels I will investigate during my PhD project. Macroinvertebrates, bacteria, fungi and small eukaryotes are crucial for the degradation of organic matter. Picture: Marc Hauber

More about the project

A major knowledge-gap in science is how climate change will affect biochemical processes, biodiversity, and production in food webs. At the center of this knowledge-gap is our understanding of how carbon is sequestered, degraded, stored, circulated, and exported in ecosystems. This knowledge is crucial to correctly model the effects of climate change in terms of carbon release to the atmosphere, but also the transport of carbon in the food webs from lower to higher trophic levels. Here we propose to focus on understudied aspects of carbon flows in coastal aquatic ecosystems that are important for overall production and biodiversity.

The initial phase of the project will focus on decomposition rates of organic matter in a climate change scenario and how they are affected by the biodiversity of microbes and detrivorous macroinvertebrates. These two types of organisms play key roles in breaking down large sized organic matter such as leaves and sedimenting phytoplankton blooms to fine particulate and dissolved organic matter. Hence, we focus on the flow and restructuring of carbon from large particles and complex molecules into simpler organic matter forms including fine particulates and dissolved organic and inorganic carbon.

The project is part of the research in the Food Web Ecology research group, Linnaeus University Centre for Ecology and Evolution in Microbial model Systems (EEMiS) and the Linnaeus Knowledge Environment Water.