Department Aquatic Ecology

Resource availability and temperature are among the most important drivers of biological processes across all scales of biological organization, from cellular metabolism, to population-level growth rates, community assembly, and even ecosystem-level fluxes of material and energy. We have separate mechanistic understandings of the influences of both temperature and resource availability on processes at all biological scales, but much less is known about how these two drivers interact. How does temperature influence different sub-cellular processes? Are all metabolic processes affected equally by warming or do some show greater temperature-sensitivity than others? If so, can we identify general rules about how particular metabolic pathways and their respective resource requirements are sensitive to temperature due to the activation energy of their metabolism? This project represents a first attempt at a comprehensive investigation of the interactive influences of temperature and resource availability on phytoplankton metabolism, and how this metabolic variation scales up to population-level dynamics. 

This project is funded by Eawag and is led by Dr. Vanessa Weber de Melo.