MAPMAKER - July 2020 until March 2021
Project Description
Marine planktonic communities carry out almost half of the net primary production on our planet, keep atmospheric CO2 levels at roughly half of what they would be otherwise, form the base of food webs and produce more than half of the oxygen we breathe. Considering the wealth and economic importance of ecosystem services and climate regulation provided by our oceans fuelled from the very base of its food web, impacts of climate change on marine plankton are still poorly investigated.
Within this project we aim to overcome disciplinary boundaries that contribute to impeding exchanges of scientific results between the research community and policy makers. We aim to build an interactive web tool for policy makers to help visualise future projections of climate change impact on global plankton ecosystems as a function of societal decisions. |
We continue the effort made by the ETH Environmental Physics (UP) Group (Zürich, Switzerland) that has mapped the biogeography of hundreds of plankton species and use this knowledge to define biomes for the surface ocean and identify hotspots of plankton diversity changes under global warming. We aim to include three fully coupled Earth System Models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase CMIP5 using three different representative concentration pathways (RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 8.5) covering the period from 2012 until 2100. We will translate projections into quantitative global impact metrics targeted at policy makers and characterize ecosystem impacts as a function of carbon emissions and global warming. International decision-makers are informed on potential future changes in global marine plankton and can start addressing challenges to marine conservation.
|
The MAPMAKER project is funded by the Geneva Science-Policy Interface and a collaboration between ETH Zurich's Environmental Physics Group and IUCN's Marine and Polar programme.
|