Ongoing Projects
- MArine Plankton diversity bioindicator scenarios for policy MAKERs (MAPMAKER)
- NitrOgen fixers structuring phyToplankton bIodiversity in the OceaN under climate change (NOTION)
- Atlantic ECOsystems assessment, forecasting & sustainability (AtlantEco)
- Our Common Future Ocean in the Earth System (COMFORT)
- X-EBUS: Extreme Ocean Weather Events and their Role for Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystems in Eastern Boundary Upwelling Systems
- 4C - Climate-Carbon Interactions in the Current Century
Global marine biodiversity supplies essential ecosystems services to human societies. Marine plankton fuel ocean productivity, drive global biogeochemical cycles and regulate the Earth’s climate. Climate-mediated loss of biodiversity has been suggested to negatively impact ocean ecosystem services, but future projections of climate change impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem function are poorly constrained due to lack of observational data. Hence, policy makers lack quantitative evidence on the vulnerability of marine ecosystems. Here, we propose a collaboration between IUCN Global Marine and Polar Programme and ETH Environmental Physics Group (UP) to inform data-driven decision making on marine biodiversity protection at the international policy level. Based on observational data and novel machine learning algorithms, UP has mapped the biogeography of thousands of plankton species. We will use this knowledge to define ocean biomes, project future changes to biodiversity and identify hotspots of diversity change. We will translate projections into quantitative global impact metrics targeted at policy makers and characterize ecosystems impacts as a function of future carbon emission and global warming. We aim to build an interactive web tool for policy makers that visualizes projected ecosystem impacts and changes in global plankton diversity as a function of societal decisions. Results will inform IUCN policy briefs and be promoted within the GSPI network.
Duration
07-2020 - 08-2021
Lead organizing partner
ETHZ and IUCN
Funding Agency
Geneva Science-Policy Interface Impact Collaboration Program 2020
.
Key publications
Righetti, D., Vogt, M., Gruber, N., Psomas, A., & Zimmermann, N. E. (2019). Global pattern of phytoplankton diversity driven by temperature and environmental variability. Science Advances, 5(5), 10. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau6253
Life in the oceans is sustained by nitrogen. In 75% of the global ocean surface, nitrogen is provided by "diazotrophs", small planktonic cells capable of reducing atmospheric dinitrogen into bioavailable forms. Diazotrophs provide the nitrogen that fuels as much as half of the global primary production and balance the global nitrogen reservoir. Hence, diazotrophs are crucial for global climate regulation. The goal of NOTION is to determine how climate change will affect the activity of diazotrophs, and how they will impact phytoplankton biodiversity and productivity in the future ocean. To that end, we will enhance global ocean ecological models with new datasets and parameterizations stemmed from dedicated experiments. NOTION will take the unprecedented challenge of integrating genetic data into biogeochemical models to cover an important current gap in our knowledge: bridging phylogenetic and functional diversity. This new insight will be highly useful for the scientific community, serving as a role model for future studies focusing on other planktonic groups. The BNP Paribas Foundation Climate & Biodiversity Initiative is committed to raise the awareness of environmental issues. Despite the critical importance of marine phytoplankton in regulating climate and providing resources to humanity, their biodiversity and functioning are mostly unknown to the public. Through a comprehensive outreach and educational program, this project will raise the NOTION of marine phytoplankton biodiversity as a key to climate change mitigation and ecosystem legacy for future generations.
Duration
04-2020 - 12.2025
Lead organizing partner
Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography (MIO), France
Funding Agency
Fondation BNP Paribas
.
Social Media
external page call_made Twitter AccountProject presentation
Key publications
The Atlantic Ocean (AO) covers ~20% of Earth’s surface and contains ~25% of the global ocean volume. Both the circulation of water masses and the ecosystems of the AO play a key role in regulating Earth’s climate and sustain highly productive marine regions and fish stocks. The ensemble of microscopic organisms (the microbiome) that float in the AO waters, though invisible to the human eye, play a pivotal role in capturing and removing CO2 from the atmosphere and in supporting the quantity of biomass available to fishes. The mean annual value added by the Atlantic maritime economy was estimated to exceed 400 billion dollars over the last 20 years, and this value is expected to continuously increase in the future. However, the state of AO ecosystems and the services provided by the microbiome are also increasingly threatened by human activities and global climate change. In a context of ever-expanding human impacts on marine resources and rapid climatic changes (e.g. changes in temperature, ocean circulation, ocean acidification, coastal erosion and the input of harmful nutrients, pollutants and microplastics), one of the greatest challenges of our time is to understand and preserve existing ecosystem services and to ensure the good environmental status of ecosystems.
Within this context, the AtlantECO H2020 project aims to develop and apply a novel unifying framework for providing knowledge-based resources to design policies, support decisions making and engage with citizens to encourage responsible behavior to manage AO system. AtlantECO revolves around four main objectives:
1. To assess the status of ecosystem structures, functions, health and services at various scales and to provide high quality gridded data products and maps.
2. To enhance knowledge and innovate by adopting standard optical and genetic observations protocols, cutting-edge network analysis methods, and better parameterizations of connectivity and biogeochemical models.
3. To assess drivers and stressors of change and forecast their impact on tipping points and recovery of ecosystem structures, functions and services, and to develop eco-socio-economic models to predict their future states.
4. To share and use capacity and knowledge across the four continents bordering the AO ensuring a seamless engagement between science, industry, policy, and society.
Within the framework of of the first objective above, members of the UP group co-lead AtlantECO’s WP2 « Marine ecosystem structure and function » (Dr. Meike Vogt, Dr. Fabio Benedetti and Dominic Ericsson). ETH UP is responsible for assembling the most extensive 3D biogeography (i.e. mapping) of the biodiversity and abundance of the microbiome at the scale of the AO. In collaboration with 18 international partner institutes, we engage in the following main tasks:
1. To assemble and map existing and new geo-referenced observations about the microbiome, plastics, the plastisphere (i.e. the microbiome interacting with the floating plastics debris) and carbon fluxes.
2. To assemble and map essential ocean variables and indicators of ecosystem services such as biodiversity, bioresources, productivity, food provision and climate support services.
3. To comprehensibly assess the status and functioning of the Atlantic Ocean ecosystem.
Ultimately, the diverse range of quality-controlled and spatially-explicit data produced by our team and collaborators will serve as a basis for analyses carried out by all 35 partnering scientific institutes.
Duration
09-2020 - 08.2024
Leading organization partner
Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Italy
Funding Agency
European Commision H2020, topic BG-08-2018-2019 All Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance Flagship
Grant - ID: 862923
Related links
external page call_made European Commission CORDIS EntryKey publications
In short, COMFORT addresses the question “what are the consequences of surpassing the ocean’s point of no return?”
COMFORT will close knowledge gaps for key ocean tipping elements under anthropogenic physical and chemical climate forcing through an interdisciplinary research approach. It will provide added value to decision and policy makers in terms of science based safe marine operating spaces, refined climate mitigation targets, and feasible long-term mitigation pathways. We will determine the consequences of passing tipping points in physical tipping elements for the marine carbon, oxygen, and nutrient cycles, as well as tipping points in biogeochemical tipping elements. The respective impact on marine ecosystems will be determined. To address this complex issue, COMFORT brings together experts from Earth system science, oceanography, fisheries science and ecology in a single integrated project who will work in parallel with a consistent set of analysis tools, scenarios, and interoperable models.
Within this context, ETH Zürich will contribute to the second work package: Dynamics, extremes, early warning indicators, and reversibility. The UP-group’s focus is on the changing nature and distribution of ocean acidification and deoxygenation extremes in the global ocean. A combination of observationally based products and model output will be used to gain insight into these topics.
Duration
09-2019 - 08-2023
Lead Organizing Partner
University of Bergen, Norway
Funding Agency
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 820989
Related links
Key publications
Extreme events on land are known to shape the structure of ecosystems and substantially affect their biogeochemical activity. Our understanding of the characteristics of extreme events in the marine realm, and their impact on ecosystems and ocean biogeochemistry remains very poor. In the future marine extreme events, such as ocean warming, ocean acidification, and loss of oxygen, will likely become more frequent and intense due to anthropogenic carbon emissions and associated climate change. Regions of particular concern are the eastern boundary upwelling systems (EBUS) and especially the California and Humboldt Current Systems, as these highly productive ecosystems are known to be very susceptible to the joint effects of multiple stressors. Already today, ecosystems in these regions are exposed to low pH waters, undersaturated waters with respect to mineral CaCO3, and are underlain by waters containing very little to no oxygen. Thus, extreme events in these regions can generate conditions far outside the tolerable ranges of many organisms, and initiate potentially strong, non-linear, and irreversible biogeochemical and ecological responses.
In this project, we determine (i) the distribution and intensity of marine extreme events in the past, present and future, (ii) their drivers and return periods, (iii) their interaction with local and remote atmospheric forcings (iv) their potential impact on lower marine trophic level ecosystems and (v) how these impacts feed back to the ocean's biogeochemical cycles in these EBUS. These objectives will be addressed using our high-resolution regional Earth System Model (ESM) ROMSOC consisting of the regional atmospheric Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) model coupled to the Regional Oceanic Modeling System (ROMS), and the Biogeochemical Elemental Cycling (BEC) model. The latter will include a better representation of the sensitivity of key ecological processes to changes in temperature, oxygen and ocean acidification. The kilometer-scale resolution of ROMSOC allows us simulate the oceanic weather and the associated extreme events with much higher fidelity than can be achieved with a global ESM, which permits us to assess the characteristics of these events with regard to their intensities, duration, severity, and return periods in an unprecedented manner for both EBUS. Of particular interest is the interaction between the highly dynamic structure of the multiple stressors in time and space with the dynamics of the ecosystems and the ocean's biogeochemical cycles. Key hypotheses we will investigate include (i) small-scale atmosphere-ocean interactions may impact the intensity and spatial extent of extreme events (ii) extreme events become more frequent and intense in a warmer, high CO2 ocean, (iii) these more frequent extreme events alter the lower trophic community structure, leading to a reduction of productivity owing to higher nutrient losses from the upwelling system, and (iv) these changes feedback to ocean biogeochemistry by increasing the loss of CO2 to the atmosphere and further increasing nutrient loss due to extreme event-induced enhanced denitrification.
Duration
09-2018 – 08-2022
Lead Organizing Partner
ETHZ Environmental Physics Group
Funding Agency
Swiss National Science Foundation
Related links
Key publications
4C addresses the crucial knowledge gap in the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide emissions, by reducing uncertainty in our quantitative understanding of carbon-climate interactions and feedbacks. This will be achieved through innovative integration of models and observations, providing new constraints on modelled carbon-climate interactions and climate projections, and supporting IPCC assessments and policy objectives.
To meet this objective, 4C will
(a) provide a step change in our ability to quantify the key processes regulating the coupled carbon-climate system,
(b) use observational constraints and improved processes understanding to provide multi-model near-term predictions and long-term projections of the climate in response to anthropogenic emissions, and
(c) deliver policy-relevant carbon dioxide emission pathways consistent with the UNFCCC Paris Agreement (PA) goals.
To achieve its goals, 4C will develop and use: state-of-the-art Earth System Models (ESMs) including biogeochemical processes not included in previous IPCC reports; novel observations to constrain the contemporary carbon cycle and its natural variability; ESM-based decadal predictions including carbon-climate feedbacks and novel initialisation methods; novel emergent constraints and weighting methods to reduce uncertainty in carbon cycle and climate projections; and novel climate scenarios following adaptive CO2 emission pathways.
The key contribution of ETH is to update the estimate of the oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2 based on observations. The last global estimate covers the period 1994 – 2007 and we try to push this as close as possible to the now, thereby aiming not only at an improved quantification but also deeper understanding of the processes that control the variability of the oceanic carbon sink across decades.
Duration
06-2019 – 05-2023
Lead Organizing Partner
University of Exeter
Funding Agency
European Union H2020 Programme
• H2020-EU.3.5.1. - Fighting and adapting to climate change
Topic(s)
• LC-CLA-08-2018 - Addressing knowledge gaps in climate science, in support of IPCC reports
Grant agreement ID: 821003
People involved
Related links
Social Media
external page call_made Twitter AccountKey publications
Gruber et al.: The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2 from 1994 to 2007, Science, 363(6432), 1193–1199, doi:10.1126/science.aau5153, 2019.