Abstract
The marine environment is especially suitable to detect and track the effects of global change on biodiversity. Because of the system's heat capacity, global change will affect the biota slowly, therefore temporary changes will have less impact on a long term. It was expected that global warming would result in higher temperatures of the sea water, but recent investigations reveal the opposite for the North Sea area (Hansen et al., 2001). Temperature changes result in the introduction of new species in the area (Kluijver, 2002). The North Sea geography enables the colonisation of 'warmer' and 'colder' species from south and north as a result of changing water temperatures. Climate changes may also favour exotic invading species, which may become dominant in some environments and threaten the regional biota. In the case of the North Sea, which is one the world's richest fishing grounds, changes in biological diversity and its consequences for productivity may have considerable economic impact. The composition of the macrobenthos in the North Sea has been studied for over a 100 years. These biological and abiotic data form a unique archive to detect the influence of climate changes on biological diversity. However, divergent nomenclature for the taxa, different data formats and storage forms/locations hinders easy comparison, merger and interpretation. The proposed project will merge the wealth of existing data by applying taxonomic validation and reformatting in order to study the relation between climate change and variations in biodiversity. In particular focus will be on the effect of invading species on biodiversity and ecosystem functions.
Netherlands