Baltic Sea bays exposed to 50 years of warming can inform how biodiversity and ecosystem functioning respond to climate change

There is little doubt that climate change is occurring, but uncertainty remains regarding its magnitude and how biodiversity and ecosystem services will be affected, particularly in aquatic environments.

Our overarching aim is to advance knowledge of how temperature change affects biodiversity and functioning of aquatic communities, to ultimately foresee how global warming will modify the Baltic Sea.

Our main questions are: i) How do Baltic Sea communities alter and/or adapt after 50-years of warming; and ii) To what extent are the changes/adaptations due to climate change reversible if original conditions are restored?

To address these questions, we will study microbes and zooplankton that are vital for nutrient cycling and ecosystem functioning.

We will sample bays that have already been influenced by 50-years of ‘experimental’ warming via thermal discharge from nuclear power plants, and compare with patterns in unheated control bays.

The large-scale, long-term observational approaches will be combined with reciprocal translocation experiments in the field, in situ warming experiments using immersion heaters, and laboratory thermal incubation experiments.

This will deliver data from areas that represent different thermal regimes and allow for unique comparisons of responses, with potential to shed new light on these issues.