Selected publications

Climate change causes a decrease in the ice cover on lakes throughout the world. Yet, there has been insufficient research into how this decline of the winter period affects the interplay of phytoplankton and zooplankton. This study shows that even a gradual decline in the average duration of ice cover can result in abrupt changes in plankton dynamics.

The authors identified major shallow lake ecosystem services and their links to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), compared service provisioning among the four ecosystem states and discussed potential trade-offs. They identified 39 ecosystem services which are linked to 10 different SDGs, while several trade-offs within and between ecosystem services across ecosystems were identified.

The authors investigated how changing nutrient loading modifies the top‐down effect of one of the worst invasive herbivorous snail species on native submerged macrophytes.The results indicate that snail herbivory may increase the chance for macrophyte collapse and shifts of shallow lakes to turbid states, and that this effect occurs at lower snail densities when nutrient concentrations increase.

Phaeocystis pouchetii regularly dominates Arctic marine plankton and is considered a key food source supporting highly productive fisheries. But the relevance of biomass transfer to higher trophic levels is debated. This study shows that endometabolic markers can be correlated to the metabolic state of Phaeocystis populations, which allows testing the influence on zooplankton trophic transfer.

Climate and land-use change drive a suite of stressors that shape ecosystems and interact to yield complex ecological responses. This study combines data across scales from 33 mesocosm experiments with those from 14 river basins and 22 cross-basin studies in Europe, producing 174 combinations of paired-stressor effects on a biological response variable.

Associations with microbial communities are crucial for most plants and animals. The authors show that in Daphnia, host genotype does not only influence gut microbiome composition, but also the structure of free-living microbial communities, i.e. the bacterioplankton. This interaction is expected to lead to feedback loops where evolutionary changes in the host might impact bacterioplankton.

A field survey along a food quantity and quality gradient revealed that both host population density as well as prevalence and diversity of epibionts (i.e. organisms living on a host) in the water flea Daphnia pulex are significantly affected by phytoplankton N:P ratio. A laboratory experiment using Daphnia magna confirmed that P‐limitation affects infestation by epibionts.

Does evolution influence ecological patterns in space? The authors synthesized 500 studies to develop a predictive framework for whether and when evolution amplifies, dampens, or creates ecological patterns. They show that local adaptation can alter spatial variation in population, community and ecosystem features. Dampening of ecological differences is the most prominent effect of evolution.