Vitenskapelig sammendrag
Climate profoundly affects ecosystem functioning, as well as human populations inhabiting and exploiting ecosystems. Hence, climate change is likely to have serious ecological, economic and societal consequences that it is urgent to investigate. We aim at developing a complete matrix community model for exploration, quantification and prediction of climate effects on lake ecosystems. To date, the consequences of climate change on lake fish communities are very poorly understood. Windermere (UK) is a large natural lake that has been intensively studied since the early 1940's, and for which we have exceptional data on nutrients, plankton, and fish. In a first step of the project we will develop separate statistical models to quantify each of the interactions in the Windermere food web, including possible demographic effects of rapid life-history evolution. Then, parameter estimates from these models will be used as matrix entries in the community model. The refinement of our matrix approach will provide a basis for predicting the effects of global warming on temperate lake ecosystems in the decades ahead. This project is a follow up of previous successful collaboration between CEES (Norway) and CEH (UK).
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