Publication Abstract

Cumulative pressures such as climate, fishing and eutrophication affect most marine ecosystems and the services we benefit from and consequently impact our societies. To understand how and in which way different ecosystems respond to these impacts, knowledge on resilience is needed. While predicting resilience is still tricky, measuring it has recently made considerable headway. To enhance the understanding of resilience dynamics we quantifily resilience and constructed folded landscapes of four marine ecosystems of northern Europe: the Icelandic Waters, the Barents Sea, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. This particular geographical setting comprises temperate and subarctic (south-north) environments and open and semi-enclosed (southeast-northwest) topographies. Some of these ecosystems were found to have evolved in a more or less continuous fashion, while others showed drastic changes. By comparing our results along these gradients, we discuss the role of connectivity and fod web complexity in the observed patterns and the implications for management of resilient futures.

Marcos Llope, Thorsten Blenckner, Paraskevas Vasilakopoulos, Niall McGinty, Christopher P. Lynam*, Pierre Hélaouët, Christian Möllmann, Romain Frelat, Joël M. Durant, Leif C. Stige, Guðrún Marteinsdóttir and Nils Chr. Stenseth