Rewiring marine food webs: predicting consequences of species distribution shifts on marine communities

Project outline and objectives:

Accelerating environmental change is radically affecting the structure, resilience and productivity of coastal marine ecosystems at both regional and global scales.

The project will combine global species distribution and trait databases, existing experimental data and new targeted field sampling to develop, test and apply an integrated modelling platform to predict how global warming driven changes in species distributions and their interactions affect the structure and dynamics of shallow marine communities.

The project will address a key knowledge gap on how species redistributions and trophic dynamics interact to simultaneously produce novel communities. We aim to forecast future species abundances for sustainable marine ecosystem management.