Team

Project owner:

Kucera @, Hillebrand @

Team members:

Anne Strack @

Other Researchers:

...

Project Description

A basic goal of the present PhD project “Rates of adaptation to environmental change extracted from the fossil record of marine plankton” is to benefit from the vast amount of plankton assemblage data that have been published in environmental data archives such as PANGAEA and NCEI and to utilize these data to better understand the variability in natural time scales. In particular, this PhD project aims to spatially and temporarily investigate the rates of adaptation of marine plankton to environmental change.

Duration:

1.2.2019-31.01.2022

Problem statement

Understanding the response of marine ecosystems to climate change requires knowledge of processes that operate over long time scales. Over the last decades, abundant data have been generated on the change in the composition of marine microplankton assemblages across the last deglaciation. These data were used to reconstruct various aspects of the ocean and climate system during this climatic upheaval; however, their potential to evaluate biotic response to climatic forcing has been rarely explored.

Yasuhara et al. (2020) showed a compositional shift in planktonic foraminifera from low to mid latitudes by analysing global census data (ForCenS, MARGO). Since they only looked at two time slices (LGM, pre-industrial), they were not able to analyse the timing of this shift in more detail. However, they assume that this shift probably started after the onset of the postglacial warming around 15 ka ago.

Hypothesis

Main Scientific Questions

Working Area

North Atlantic Ocean

Data set

We compiled records of plankton response to the last deglaciation covering the entire North Atlantic Ocean. The records comprise assemblage composition data of marine zooplankton (planktonic foraminifera) and phytoplankton (coccolithophores and dinoflagellate cysts) covering the last 24 ka with a resolution of at least 1 ka. The comparability of the data is ensured as follows: For all sites, which are included in the PALMOD 130k marine palaeoclimate data synthesis V1.0 (Jonkers et al., 2020), the provided revised age models are used. For all other sites, which are not included in this synthesis, the same approach was used to revise the published age models to ensure the comparability of all analysed sites. The data set has a

References

Jonkers, L., Cartapanis, O., Langner, M., McKay, N., Mulitza, S., Strack, A., & Kucera, M. (2020). Integrating palaeoclimate time series with rich metadata for uncertainty modelling: strategy and documentation of the PalMod 130k marine palaeoclimate data synthesis. Earth System Science Data, 12(2), 1053–1081. doi:10.5194/essd-12-1053-2020