Department Aquatic Ecology

The effects of warming on populations, communities and ecosystems are currently central topics of research in ecology and evolution, due to predicted climate change. However, warming will not occur in isolation to other types of abiotic environmental change. It is therefore important to consider how other gradients of environmental change may interact with warming. In aquatic environments, resource limitation and warming may increasingly occur together, because as waters warm they become increasingly stratified, preventing the mixing and resuspension of resources from the sediment. Resources and environmental temperature are both important drivers of metabolic processes, which have impacts across all scales of biological organization, from cells to ecosystems. The overarching goal of this project is to determine the extent to which warming alters essential resource requirements and elemental stoichiometry in freshwater phytoplankton, and in turn how such changes may influence competitive species interactions, community assembly and ecosystem functioning under warming. We aim to understand these impacts from a mechanistic perspective, addressing multiple levels of biological organization, from molecular to population, and community-level differences.​

This project is funded by the SNSF for 4 years (started in 2021). Sarah Levasseur is the PhD student leading the ecological component of this project and Dr. Vanessa Weber de Melo is the postdoc leading the molecular and evolutionary work on the project.