Biological responses to climate change

 

One of the largest uncertainties in forecasting how climate change will affect ecosystems is in understanding how climate change will affect the nature of interactions among species. While individual, population and species level biological responses to climate change are relatively well documented, community-level impacts are more difficult to quantify as they depend both on the response of individual species and the indirect effects of interactions among species.  Not only is there a need to integrate species interactions with climate change, but also to recognize the potential for species traits to evolve rapidly in response to a changing climate, highlighting the need for an approach that integrates both ecological and evolutionary responses to climate change.

 

To address these issues we use a combination of manipulative experiments ranging from individual physiology to food webs, mathematical modeling and compilation of historical time series. Study systems include both lake and coastal fish communites , as well as their zooplankton prey.

 

A great challenge facing ecologists trying to predict ecosystem responses to climate change is that we have no recent analogous conditions to use for comparison. To overcome this challenge we use unique facilities to set up reciprocal transplant experiments placed inside a large heated enclosure and in an adjacent reference area in the Baltic Sea archipelago.