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Plankton dynamics and global change: the North Sea regime shift

Objectif

Marine regime shifts can be defined as sudden, large-scale changes in the abundance of species on several trophic levels. It seems that one of the main reasons for regime shifts is that ecosystems respond non-linearly to changes in the environment, so that a gradual environmental change (e.g. temperature increase) may lead to a sudden ecosystem response when some threshold is reached. Regime shifts may have large consequences for fisheries (as documented for the North Pacific) and consequently for the society.
Therefore, understanding of regime shifts is of utmost importance to predict the ecosystem effects of global climate change and research on this topic is strongly encouraged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There is strong evidence th at a regime shift took place in the North Sea around the late-1980s. Recent studies have shown a step-wise change in the abundance of many species belonging to different trophic levels. Although these biological changes have been found related to the atmospheric and hydrographic forcing, the causative mechanisms of interaction between them are not fully understood.
In this project we propose to investigate the North Sea shift by applying non-parametric techniques (able to account for environment thresholds) to the plankton time-series of the North Sea from which the shift was reported. To do so, this proposal establishes collaboration between two top European research centres, the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo, which will provide the modelling background, and the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, which will provide the taxonomic time-series and ecological knowledge, necessary to develop the mathematical modelling. Thus, this project has the potential to clarify how internal ecosystem forces and external environmental forcing interacts to produce regime shifts, which is an extremely important question for marine ecosystems.

Appel à propositions

FP6-2005-MOBILITY-5
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Coordinateur

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Contribution de l’UE
Aucune donnée
Adresse
Problemveien 5-7
OSLO
Norvège

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Coût total
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