hand holdning a measuring instrument inserted into one of four test tubes with bottom sediments

Project: Baltic Sea bays exposed to 50 years of warming can inform how biodiversity and ecosystem functioning respond to climate change

While there is little doubt that climate change is occurring, uncertainty remains regarding its magnitude and how biodiversity and ecosystem services will be affected, particularly in aquatic environments. This project will study and compare microbes and zooplankton that are vital for marine nutrient cycling in two bays in the Baltic Sea with different thermal histories.

Project information

Project manager
Anders Forsman
Other project members
Mark Dopson, Samuel Hylander, Marcelo Ketzer, Ida Krogsgaard Svendsen, Songjun Li, Romana Salis, Emelie Nilsson, Johanna Sunde, Marcelo Ketzer, Laura Seidel
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University
Financier
The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet)
Timetable
1 Jan 2020–31 Dec 2024
Subject
Ecology (Department of Biology and Environmental Science, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences)

More about the project

There is little doubt that climate change is occurring, but uncertainty remains regarding its magnitude and how biodiversity and ecosystem services will be affected, particularly in aquatic environments. Our overarching aim is to advance knowledge of how temperature change affects biodiversity and functioning of aquatic communities, to ultimately foresee how global warming will modify the Baltic Sea.

Our main questions are:

  1. How do Baltic Sea communities alter and/or adapt after 50 years of warming?
  2. To what extent are the changes/adaptations due to climate change reversible if original conditions are restored?

To address these questions, we will study microbes and zooplankton that are vital for nutrient cycling and ecosystem functioning. We will sample bays that have already been influenced by 50 years of ‘experimental’ warming via thermal discharge from nuclear power plants, and compare with patterns in unheated control bays.

The large-scale, long-term observational approaches will be combined with reciprocal translocation experiments in the field, in situ warming experiments using immersion heaters, and laboratory thermal incubation experiments. This will deliver data from areas that represent different thermal regimes and allow for unique comparisons of responses, with potential to shed new light on these issues.

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

Staff