Natural ecosystems are often too complex to study them under controlled laboratory conditions. Organisms interact with their environment in multifaceted ways. Our understanding of how species traits, species interactions and evolution of individual species contribute to ecosystem functions is therefore still very fragmentary. Nevertheless, we urgently need better insights in the functioning of ecosystems to predict how they will change under anthropogenic pressures such as global warming or ocean acidification.
In this research line, VLIZ aims to unravel important processes in natural plankton communities such as ecosystem functions, and mutualist and antagonistic interactions among different species using an ecosystems biology approach. Specifically, VLIZ wants to use high throughput sequencing to describe the composition (metagenomics) and functions (meta-transcriptomics) of plankton communities. This information will be used to model relevant ecosystem processes such as biogeochemical cycling. VLIZ is furthermore interested to investigate how such processes will alter under various scenarios of global change.
The study area is primarily the southern North Sea, where field surveys can readily be conducted to cover seasonal and spatial dynamics of plankton communities.
