Developing integrated models of Southern Ocean food webs: Including ecological complexity, accounting for uncertainty and the importance of scale

By E. Murphy, R. Cavanagh, E. Hofmann, S. Hill, A. Constable, Daniel P. Costa, M. Pinkerton, N. Johnston, P. Trathan, J. Klinck and 4 more. 2012

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Southern Ocean supports diverse and unique ecosystems that have been impacted by more than two centuries of exploitation and are now experiencing rapid changes in ocean temperature and seasonal ice cover due to climate warming. Understanding and projecting responses of Southern Ocean marine ecosystems to changing climate conditions and direct human impacts, such as fisheries, requires integrated ecosystem analyses at scales previously unexplored. Here we consider the main ecological and modelling challenges in predicting the responses of Southern Ocean ecosystems to change, and propose three interlinked focus areas that will advance the development of integrated models for Southern Ocean ecosystems. The first focus area is development of fundamental understanding of the factors that determine the structure and function of the food webs at multiple scales. Ecological research in the Southern Ocean is often centred on key species or localised systems, a tendency which is reflected in existing food web and ecosystem models. To build on this, a systematic analysis of regional food web structure and function is required. The second focus area is development of a range of mechanistic models that vary in their resolution of ecological processes, and consider links across physical scales, biogeochemical cycles and feedbacks, and the central role of zooplankton. These two focus areas underlie the third, which is development of methodologies for scenario testing across a range of trophic levels of the effects of past and future changes, which will facilitate consideration of the underlying complexity of interactions and the associated uncertainty. The complex nature of interactions determining Southern Ocean ecosystem structure and function will require new approaches, which we propose should be developed within a scale-based framework that emphasises both physical and ecological aspects.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ad86a19104809723e392067f3c1cafc978f864d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. Bruno Danis
2. C. Broyer
3. Y. Ropert‐Coudert
4. B. David
5. H. Loeng
6. Falk Huettmann
7. E. Murphy
8. Huw Griffiths

In Global and Planetary Change

1. C. Broyer
2. Bruno Danis
3. Y. Ropert‐Coudert
4. B. David
5. H. Loeng
6. E. Murphy
7. Christoph Held
8. Huw Griffiths

In Oceanography

1. Bruno Danis
2. C. Broyer
3. B. David
4. H. Loeng
5. E. Murphy
6. Christoph Held
7. Huw Griffiths
8. T. Kristiansen

Citations in the corpus

• Biogeographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean (2014, background): “Moreover, Murphy et al. (2012) express the necessity of analysis and predicting models for food web structure and function to understand interactions of food web components, from phytoand zooplankton to top predators, and the possible responses of the different actors of Antarctic communities…”
• Krill, climate, and contrasting future scenarios for Arctic and Antarctic fisheries (2014, background): “Murphy et al. (2012, 2013), however, began a process of comparative analyses of ecosystems around the Southern Ocean and Murphy et al. (2013) compare the regions of the western Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia, in the Atlantic sector.”