Response of temperate marine food webs to climate change and ocean acidification: bridging the gap between experimental manipulation and complex foodwebs

• Main Author: Ullah, Md Hadayet
• Other Authors: Nagelkerken, Ivan, Fordham, Damien, School of Biological Sciences
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Global warming; ocean acidification; food web; trophic flow; fisheries; biodiversity; trophic interaction strengths; Ocean acidification
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2440/120346

Global warming and ocean acidification are forecast to exert significant impacts on marine ecosystems, while intensive exploitation of commercial marine species has already caused large-scale reorganizations of biological communities in many of the world’s marine ecosystems. Whilst our understanding on the impact of warming and acidification in isolation on individual species has steadily increased, we still know little on the combined effect of these two global stressors on marine food webs, especially under realistic experimental settings or real-world systems. We particularly lack evidence of how the top of the food web (piscivores and apex predators) will respond to future climate change (ocean warming and acidification) because responses of ecological communities could vary with increasing trophic level. The picture is further complicated by the interaction of global and local stressors that affect our oceans, such as fishing pressure. Accurate predictions of the potential effects of these global and local stressors at ecosystem-levels require a comprehensive understanding of how entire communities of species respond to climate change. Mechanistic insights revealed by a combination of different approaches such as experimental manipulation of food webs, and integrated with ecosystem modelling approaches provide a way forward to improve our understanding of the functioning of future food webs. In this thesis, I show how the combined effect of such global and local stressors could affect a three trophic level temperate marine mesocosm food web and how these outcomes could be translated to predict the response of ecological communities in a four trophic level natural food web. Using a sophisticated mesocosm experiment (elevated pCO2 of approximately 900 ppm and warming of +2.8°C), I first modelled how energy fluxes are likely to change in marine food webs in response to future climate. I experimentally show that the combined stress of acidification and warming could reduce energy flows from the first trophic ...