Functional Ecology
Profile
Our questions:
• How do climate, environment and human activities affect cold water marine ecosystems?
• How variable are essential ecosystem processes and functions across large spatial scales and over long time spans?
Our focus:
• We study coastal and shelf communities of the sea floor (of the sediment-water interface)
• We look at the large scales in space (regional systems) and time (decadal to evolutionary time scales)
• We emphasise the human perspective, i.e. we are interested in those ecological functions that are relevant for the goods and services delivered by the ecosystem
Our tasks:
• To collect, secure and make available information -> building and management of geo-referenced information systems
• To determine the evolutionary foundation of ecological dynamics -> molecular biological analysis of functional strategies
• To understand ecosystem “behaviour” -> spatio-temporal analysis and modelling of ecological processes
