Theme - The Aquatic-Terrestrial Habitats and Linkages

The Aquatic-Terrestrial Habitats and Linkages

In recent years, ecologists have come to realize that ecosystems have diffuse boundaries, and that habitat perturbations can have far-reaching effects across these boundaries. Changes in land-use in terrestrial habitats, for example, can have strong effects on biodiversity in aquatic ecosystems; only recently have we come to realize these effects may reciprocate back to terrestrial systems. The tight couplings of adjacent ecosystems means that feedback loops may amplify the effects of habitat change, leading to disruption of ecosystem services such as productive agricultural of forest land, or sustainable fisheries.

The aquatic-terrestrial group conducts research on the following areas:

• Multi-scalar effects of landscape patterns as drivers of reciprocal ecosystem subsidies.
• Effects of forestry on food webs and reciprocal aquatic-terrestrial linkages as well as on the interaction between forest age and light on stream food webs
• Modelling habitat quality based on the interaction between flow and habitat for different organisms
• Swedish public perspectives of forests