Experiment on impacts of ocean warming and biotic stress in a coastal seaweed ecosystem ...

• Main Authors: Wahl, Martin, Werner, Franziska Julie, Buchholz, Björn, Raddatz, Stefanie, Graiff, Angelika, Matthiessen, Birte, Karsten, Ulf, Hiebenthal, Claas, Hamer, Jorin, Ito, Maysa, Gülzow, Elisa, Rilov, Gil, Guy-Haim, Tamar
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2019
• Subjects: Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification BIOACID; Ocean acidification
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.906912; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.906912

The plea for using more “realistic,” community‐level, investigations to assess the ecological impacts of global change has recently intensified. Such experiments are typically more complex, longer, more expensive, and harder to interpret than simple organism‐level benchtop experiments. Are they worth the extra effort? Using outdoor mesocosms, we investigated the effects of ocean warming (OW) and acidification (OA), their combination (OAW), and their natural fluctuations on coastal communities of the western Baltic Sea during all four seasons. These communities are dominated by the perennial and canopy‐forming macrophyte Fucus vesiculosus—an important ecosystem engineer Baltic‐wide. We, additionally, assessed the direct response of organisms to temperature and pH in benchtop experiments, and examined how well organism‐level responses can predict community‐level responses to the dominant driver, OW. OW affected the mesocosm communities substantially stronger than acidification. OW provoked structural and ... : Supplement to: Wahl, Martin; Werner, Franziska Julie; Buchholz, Björn; Raddatz, Stefanie; Graiff, Angelika; Matthiessen, Birte; Karsten, Ulf; Hiebenthal, Claas; Hamer, Jorin; Ito, Maysa; Gülzow, Elisa; Rilov, Gil; Guy-Haim, Tamar (2020): Season affects strength and direction of the interactive impacts of ocean warming and biotic stress in a coastal seaweed ecosystem. Limnology and Oceanography, 65(4), 807-827 ...