Cascading, interactive, and indirect effects of climate change on aquatic communities, habitats, and ecosystems
Climate change is rapidly altering the biogeochemistry and physical forcing of aquatic environments; however, quantifying and predicting the effects of these changes on aquatic organisms remains a major and pressing challenge. While changing seawater chemistry and temperature have been shown to have profound direct effects on aquatic organisms, our insight into feedbacks and indirect and interactive effects have often been beyond the scope of previous studies. Yet, to make viable predictions about aquatic ecosystem structure and function on a changing planet, a multi-faceted approach from controlled laboratory studies to long-term observations of habitats is needed.
This special issue welcomes contributions of investigations of climate change effects from empirical studies on individual species to whole communities, and modeling studies. In particular, we invite manuscripts reporting original hypothesis-driven, process-focused research that unravel unexpected connections, feedback mechanisms, indirect effects, and linkages across trophic scales.
Purely descriptive contributions, papers examining the direct impact of CO2-driven changes on biochemistry, or investigations of predominantly local relevance are discouraged. The contributions should fit L&O’s scope and will be assessed with the same level of rigour, by editors, guest editors, and invited referees, as regular journal issues. Accepted papers will be published online in Early View with a permanent doi upon acceptance, with the completed issue expected to be published in February 2023. Manuscript proposals or preliminary inquiries on the suitability of your work are welcome (including those for review articles). Additional invited review and/or synthesis papers will be commissioned by the guest editors. For more information, please contact one of the special issue editors below or the Deputy Editor, Julia Mullarney, julia.mullarney@waikato.ac.nz.
Submission of manuscripts is open now until 15 February, 2022.
Special Issue Editors:
Helle Ploug, University of Gothenburg
Hans-Peter Grossart, Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries
Sally Woodin, University of South Carolina
Maarten Boersma, Alfred Wegener Institute
Ryan Sponseller, Umeå University