Global Environmental Change | - CCMAR -

 

 

The impact of anthropogenically-induced climate change and over-exploitation of natural resources are considerable threats to the future stability and sustainability of marine ecosystems. Understanding how the ocean acts and reacts to climate and other changes is one of our major research goals. These changes potentially affect the biological diversity and function of the ocean at a wide range of scales:

  • In space - from local ecosystems to the whole planet;
  • In time - from short-term responses to evolutionary time scales;
  • In biological organization - from molecules and genes to entire ecosystems.

We aim to infer and understand processes and patterns of the past and present and to use those to raise likely hypotheses for the future. To achieve this, we develop interdisciplinary research across sub-disciplines of ocean science, including oceanography, marine ecology, evolutionary biology and bioinformatics. This research divides into three work packages:

  1. Coastal and Open Ocean Processes, in which we infer physical, chemical and biological processes and interactions, past oceanic processes and climate conditions, carbon and other bioelemental cycles, and ecosystem functions and services.
  2. Effects of Ocean Changes in Space and Time, in which we test ecophysiological responses, discover and predict biogeographical and evolutionary dynamics along species ranges, and causes and effects of direct anthropogenic ocean changes.
  3. Evolution in Changing Environments, where we we study the effects of altered and novel species communities resulting from differential ecosystem tolerance to changing environments.
Thematic line leader