Description
Size of organisms has significant relevance for key processes in ecosystems, and there is a fundamental need for understanding impacts of global warming on the size in the Arctic. The project will assess size responses in biological structures at different levels (genome, cell, body, community) to changing thermal regimes. The synthesis of the data generated within the project will provide a comprehensive view of the effects of the climate change on size. The project will be structured along work-packages reflecting habitat and organism type, and will involve field sampling, experimental studies, body-, cell and genome size analysis. The project will address scientists (conference presentations and scientific publications), wider public (popular science articles and science festivals) and education in schools (ready to use lessons scenarios). Experience gained in all steps of the DWARF project will strengthen the links between the partner institutions. The combination of the diverse background expertise of the partners will contribute to comprehensive understanding of key effects of the climate warming in the Arctic.
Summary of project results
Decline in organisms’ body-size (at individual, population and community scales) has been recently predicted to be the third universal biological response to global warming in both aquatic and terrestrial systems. Still the existing evidence supporting these predictions is fragmentary and does not cover polar organisms. The main goal of the project was to test hypothesis that elevated temperatures will induce size reductions in a large range of animals in the Arctic. This was achieved by exploring variability of size of biological structures at different levels (genome, cell, body, population and community) in response to changing thermal regimes. The study focused on a selected range of animal taxa (invertebrates and fish) in terrestrial, limnetic and marine habitats). The project research was based on extensive genome size database analyses, experiments, examination of materials collected in marine, terrestrial and limnetic habitats located across the latitudinal and thermal gradients from Scotland to northern Svalbard (Fig. 1) as well as analyses of historical material archived in museum collections (in Reykjavik and Trondheim) and paleontological samples form long cores covering the period of the Holocene (the last 14,000 years). The project research generated comprehensive information on the relationships between temperature and other environmental factors and the organism (genome, cell, body) size in terrestrial, limnetic and marine systems. A change in size was found to be a universal response to warming in most of the ecosystem elements examined. These results form a basis for the future monitoring and predictions of the possible consequences of the climate change on the structure and functioning of the Arctic ecosystems. The main activities financed by the project resulted so far in 23 scientific publications published/submitted to scientific journals, presentations at 24 international and national scientific conferences, several dissemination events aimed at general public and three popular science books.
Summary of bilateral results
This collaboration was initiated without any prior research collaboration between the institutions involved. This project succeeded in combining the strengths of the research groups with very different expertise and previous experiences (experimental vs. field ecologists, terrestrial limnetic an marine scientists) into a coherent research project. The combination of the expertise allowed to achieve the main goal of the project – to assess the comprehensive picture of the possible environmental change effects on the organism size in the Arctic – explored across different habitats (marine, limnetic, terrestrial), levels of biological organisations (genome, cell, body, population, community) and taxa (vertebrates, invertebrates). These experience of bilateral partnership will strengthen the future collaboration between the groups, and thus fuel future joint activities and proposals. The bilateral collaboration clearly provided synergy effects by combining the different strengths in the research groups to provide a fruitful environment for exciting science.