Objective
Shallow lakes have suffered the sudden loss of transparency and vegetation subject to human-induced eutrophication. Restoration to their original clear state is of great social and scientific interest. Therefore, there is a great concern on the possible negative influences of increasing temperatures on their recovery. A key aspect for their recovery is the interactions of macrophytes and algae with nutrients, and their control by grazers, which are in turn preyed upon by fish.
Although these interactions have been described, the ecological processes behind them are not well understood. Therefore, this proposal aims to study the ecological processes behind the establishment of the clear / turbid state of shallow lakes and its interactions with different thermal scenarios. Special focus will be directed at the trophic dynamics of zooplankton and their role in shallow lake food webs. In order to accomplish this objective I will join an ongoing multidisciplinary experiment in Denmark. In this project, mesocosms consisting of 24 enclosures have been established and flow-through heated systems are used to mimic the predicted seasonal variations in temperature expected to occur during the period 2071-2100 in Denmark. Sediments from many different natural shallow lake s are used as colonisation bank.
I will study changes in abundance and biomass of selected species and undertake detailed analysis of stoichiometric composition, fatty acids, amino acids and isotopic signatures of the different food web compartments, with special focus on zooplankton. Addition of 15N will provide new information on turnover rates, which complemented with specific experiments on trophic fractionation should give a solid basis for correctly interpreting the mesocosm changes shown by stable is otopes. These analyses in combination will elucidate new aspects of the food web flow and predict the potential changes to occur due to the interactions of climate change with different nutrient levels.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologyphycology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculeslipids
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryamines
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologyinvertebrate zoology
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Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2002-MOBILITY-5
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European FellowshipsCoordinator
AARHUS C
Denmark