Marine Ecosystem Dynamics and Management

Welcome!

The working group of Prof. Dr. Christian Möllmann is analysing climatic and fishery induced effects on the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems with the goal to develop better ecosystem-based management strategies.

Photo: Steffen Funk IMF

Baltic Sea Research Foundation Award 2021

PhD thesis in cooperation between University of Hamburg and Thünen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries wins prize of Baltic Sea Research Foundation 2021

On August 10, 2021, the dissertation of Dr. Steffen Funk from the Institute of Marine Ecosystem and Fishery Sciences was awarded the prize of the Baltic Sea Research Foundation. Unfortunately, a public award ceremony had to be omitted this year due to the pandemic.

In his work, which was the result of a cooperation between the University of Hamburg and the Thünen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries, junior scientist Dr. Steffen Funk took a closer look at the spatial distribution of cod in the western Baltic Sea, their diet and growth. To this end, a transdisciplinary approach used the ecological knowledge of local set net fishermen from Schleswig-Holstein to reveal seasonal distribution patterns of cod in the western Baltic Sea as well as their seasonal habitat preferences. (more info)

https://www.deutsches-meeresmuseum.de/forschungsstiftung-ostsee/unsere-foerderung

https://www.thuenen.de/de/of/

Photo: Heike Schwermer

Conflicts in Fisheries Management

Heike Schwermer is working to enhance the system understanding to achieve a sustainable management of the Western Baltic Cod stock.
Find a description of her PhD project funded by the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt here.

Photo: Saskia Otto IHF

INDperform

Saskia Otto and a team of Master and PhD students just released a software tool - the R package ‚INDperform‘ - that helps validating the performance of ecological indicators and assessing the ecosystem status based on a suite of indicators. The package is build on a framework recently published by Saskia and co-authors (Otto et al. 2018) and offers functions to

identify temporal indicator changes,
model relationships to pressures while taking non-linear responses and temporal autocorrelation into account, and to
quantify the robustness of these models.

It can be installed from CRAN directly or from github as development version: https://github.com/saskiaotto/INDperform.

Photo: Floeter IFM

Who eats whom in the Baltic Sea ?

Saskia Otto has analysed the performance of 13 ecosystem indicators for the Baltic Sea health.

Read the Interview in the Hamburger Abendblatt.

Photo: Romain Frelat IHF

Community ecology in 3D

A new method reveals the spatio-temporal dynamics of the North Sea fish community.

"Community ecology in 3D: Tensor decomposition reveals
spatio-temporal dynamics of large ecological communities"
PLoS ONE 12(11): e0188205.

Photo: Jens Floeter IHF

Offshore Wind Farms

Offshore Wind Farms act like small mixers in the summer - stratified North Sea.

“Pelagic effects of offshore wind farm foundations in the stratified North Sea”.
Progress in Oceanography 156. (2017): S. 154-173.

Photo: UHH/CEN/L. Wolf

Form follows function

Romain Frelat has analysed the diversity of North Sea fish forms ...
...read the interview here !