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Description
Climate change is impacting marine systems. Obvious and increasing modifications are witnessed through ocean warming and acidification. These changes strongly influence ocean climate, biogeochemical cycling and fundamental biological processes. Plankton are the base of the food chain and promote ocean services such as ocean production, fisheries, oxygen and carbon cycling. Predicting changes to these services requires an improved understanding of how phytoplankton will react to the changes in habitat, through changing physiological and ecosystem stressors/drivers. Quantifying plankton response to climate change is crucial for understanding the long-term stability of marine ecosystems to enable better ecosystem management. Model representations of plankton responses are mainly based on short-term experiments, and these experiments do not provide information on the evolutionary potential of these organisms. Importantly, science is often developed independent of user requirements so that scientific products are not fit-for-purpose. Through this project we aim to understand evolutionary responses to warming and acidification in marine plankton, focusing on two model organisms: Skeletonema marinoi and Emiliania huxleyi. These are globally distributed algae, often producing very large blooms in coastal marine areas. The new knowledge of planktonic response to climate change will be incorporated into coupled climate-ecosystem models to provide key stakeholders, participating throughout the project to secure targeted scientific products, with relevant information for decision making.