Climate change drives ecological shifts
Regime shifts are abrupt, large-scale changes to ecosystems that can have a major and long-term impact on the environment. There is some evidence that regime shifts occurred in all European seas in the 1980s. The EU-funded 'Synchronous regime shifts across European seas' (SYNRESH) project aimed to find out whether these regime changes were linked, and what could be the driving forces. They achieved these aims by collecting and scanning large amounts of data from 11 marine basins for patterns. SYNRESH found that there was some synchronicity between regime shifts in the late 1980s: most basin ecosystems changed within a year of each other. While the definitive cause remains unclear, there is some evidence that changes in northern hemisphere temperature and artic air pressure drove these changes. Researchers also looked at ecological pressures on a common species of plankton as a marker for regime shifts. They found that predation, sea temperature and currents had the biggest influence on species abundance. SYNRESH has shown beyond reasonable doubt that large-scale drivers (such as temperature changes) exert a massive influence on global marine ecosystems. The project highlighted the urgent need for better indicators of marine ecosystem health and an early warning system for regime shifts.
Keywords
Ecological shifts, regime shifts, ecosystems, European seas, ecosystem health
