Abstract
The project will investigate biodiversity in a natural ecosystem, believed to be reasonably representative of the coastal marine environment (i.e., the Risør area along the Norwegian Skagerrak coast). In the project novel approaches to the analysis of fish communities will be developed. The fish data for the Risør area is very detailed in space and time within the time period 1989-1992 and 1996-99. The methods developed for the Risør data will then be applied to the Flødevigen beach seine data, which spans most of this century. This will allow the project to assess the differences in biodiversity and community functioning between natural and disturbed areas. The project will also attempt to apply the methods developed to other types of communities. Specifically the project will analyse benthic data from the Jøssingfjord.The strength of the project is the coupling of biological competence (both applied by the Flødevigen Research Station and theoretical by the Stenseth group at the University of Oslo) and statistical expertise in state-of-the-art data modelling (i.e., the Norwegian Computing Center). Through this cooperation the project will be able to develop a full statistical model for biodiversity without losing biological information.
Norway