Impact on oceanic ecosystems (WP4.1)

Contact persons: Mark Payne (DTU AQUA) and Hjalmar Hatun (HAV)

The North Atlantic marine ecosystem is widely recognised as being closely coupled to its physical environment:  changes in the physical system have lead to large scale changes in the abundance, distribution and/or productivity of the biological system with consequences for all trophic levels, from plankton to whales and seabirds and thereby impact the human communities that are dependent on these resources.

The tight physical-biological coupling presents the potential for translating predictions about the physical environment into predictions about the biological one.

Our goals:

• examine the potential for making predictions about the marine ecosystem, based on predictions of the marine physical environment
• review the current state of the art
• identify where predictions are feasible and scientifically supported
• identify a path forward that would enable such predictive capability in the future

How will we make predictions?

We will use the physical and biogeochemical output from the CMIP5 decadal prediction experiments together with existing knowledge of mechanisms and correlative associations linking physical and biological dynamics

We are going to examine predictability across multiple trophic levels -plankton to sea birds and top-predators- and scales -from the dynamics of individual populations to the entire ecosystem.

We will focus on:

• general studies examining key mechanistic hypotheses that are thought to determine biological dynamics in the ocean
•  population-specific case-studies

Particular attention will be paid to assessing the skill of the predictions in a hindcast mode, and to the consistency of future predictions.

Case studies identified:

1.    Recruitment of Blue Whiting

2.    Spatial Distribution of Pelagic fish in the North Atlantic

3.    Breeding success of Kittiwakes

4.    Faroes shelf ecosystem dynamics

End-users: NACLIM WP4.1 cooperates closely with the ICES working group WGWIDE, read more about this cooperation [>>]