Nova Mieszkowska 1,2, Guillem Chust3, Mike Burrows4, Steve Hawkins5,2
1University of Liverpool, UK - 2 Marine Biological Association, UK - 3AZTI Marine Research, Spain - 4Scottish Association for Marine Science, UK - 5University of Southampton, UK
Our knowledge of the responses of marine species to climate change in European seas is substantial, however, comparative ecological assessments across biotic groups and geographic regions are lacking. This makes the identification of underlying processes associated with climate-driven changes in marine communities problematic due to the uneven distribution and duration of monitoring programmes. To address this knowledge gap the Community Thermal Index (CTI) was calculated for sixty five long-term biodiversity monitoring programmes comprising 1,817 species of zooplankton, benthos, demersal, and pelagic communities. CTI analysis showed a clear response to ongoing ocean warming via abundance increases of lusitanian species (tropicalization, 54%) and decreases of boreal species (deborealization, 18%) over the past four decades. Tropicalization dominated Atlantic sites compared to semi-enclosed basins such as the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas, probably due to physical barrier constraints to connectivity and species colonization. Such meta-analyses can be used to identify climate refugia as important reservoirs of biodiversity, hotspots of high biodiversity, climate velocity, and sentinel systems.
Biography
Mieszkowska has been working on the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on rocky intertidal species for over two decades. She runs the MarClim project, the most spatio-temporally extensive time-series for intertidal systems globally, which has shown some of the fastest responses of species to climate change in any natural system, and her omics-to-ecosystems research programme investigates the biological mechanisms underpinning species responses to multiple stressors.