Project Details
Projekt
Interactions between temperature-driven shifts in zooplankton metabolic requirements and resource quality, consequences for trophodynamics and food webs structure
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541468392
Given the impact of temperature on metabolic rates of ectotherms, global warming is likely to modify the nutritional demands of planktonic consumers. Furthermore, alterations of dissolved nutrient concentrations modify the chemical composition, and thereby quality, of resources in natural systems. Based on the above, we predict that simultaneous shifts in resource quality and consumer nutritional demands create the potential for nutritional mismatches in planktonic food webs. Such mismatches between the metabolic demands of consumers and the quality of their resource can have far-reaching consequences as they influence interaction strengths and trophic transfer efficiencies of energy within food webs. Despite years of research in the field of ecological stoichiometry and high awareness on the ecological implications of increasing temperatures, we still know very little on the interactions between stoichiometric dietary needs and temperature. We will address this topic through a combination of (1) cutting-edge short-term laboratory microcosm to assess the conditions that may promote nutrient limitation in various zooplankton groups over their operating temperature range, (2) medium-term field mesocosm experiments to investigate how nutritional mismatches impact mechanistic relationships across trophic levels that take place in complex natural systems, and (3) long-term evolution experiments to test whether the negative effects of these mismatches are counteracted by physiological and evolutionary responses. Hence, we will assess the impacts of global and regional change on multiple organisational levels ranging from the individual, to the population, and community scale, and thereby provide a holistic assessment of bottom-up and top-down processes within planktonic food webs.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
