Tropical coral reefs are changing. Some researchers suggest that modern tropical reefs could take the shape of habitat mosaics. Each patch of the mosaic are small patch-habitats of different regime types (e.g. coral-, sponge-, or algae-dominated) that coexist next to each other.
The Wadden Sea creates the largest unbroken tidal flat system in the world. This allows marine organisms of all shapes and sizes to flourish and draws in other migratory species like birds and seals from great distances. However, climate change and other anthropogenic forces have disrupted the balance of the Wadden Sea.
Could a probiotic 'vaccination' protect tropical corals from environmental stress? Researchers have been observing large-scale coral bleaching since the 1980s, caused in particular by climate change and the resulting continuous rise in water temperatures in our oceans.
First successful sexual reproduction of South Sea corals in Germany - At the lab aquarium facility of the ICBM research group Environmental Biochemistry, headed by Prof. Dr. Peter Schupp, Dr. Samuel Nietzer and Matthew Jackson recently were the first in raising sexually reproduced offspring of stony corals in Germany. This marks a crucial step in their efforts for research on the conservation of reef corals.
It depends to a major degree on size and shape whether an organism manages to prevail in a given environment. A novel study took advantage from the exceptional diversity of shapes in phytoplankton to elucidate the relationship between evolutionary conditions, morphology, and taxonomic diversity.
A global team of researchers has documented the pervasive impacts of noise on marine animals and ecosystems and identified actions to return to the soundtrack of the healthy ocean. Rain falls lightly on the ocean’s surface. Marine mammals chirp and squeal as they swim along. But the soundtrack of the healthy ocean no longer reflects the acoustic environment of today’s ocean, plagued with human-created noise.
Marine conservation research is at a watershed moment. Human activities are impacting coastal and ocean ecosystems to a greater degree and at faster rates than ever before in human history. Understanding these impacts and developing effective marine conservation strategies to address them requires leveraging all the tools of ecology as well as other natural and social science disciplines.
While the primary aim of ecologists is to understand the interactions among organisms and their environment, we also have to be concerned about practical applications in the conservation of ecosystems, the protection of biodiversity, the regulation of composition of the biomass, the management of natural renewable resources – both in space and in time.
Close your eyes for a moment and listen to the space you are in. Maybe you hear colleagues talking in the hall, the purr of a hard disc spinning, rain hitting the window, or when in the field the humming of a research vessel’s engine, with the hint of breaking waves against your cabin window. The world around us is full of sound and we are often only partly aware of the important role it plays in the perception of our environment and the information we implicitly derive from it.
The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14 provide for the designation of at least 10% of coastal and offshore marine areas as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) worldwide by 2020.
