Andreas Lehmann

Climate change is projected to not only shift environmental means but to also increase variability around means and the intensity of extreme events. This may exert additional stress to organisms, or, in contrast, provide transient refuges from stress. We hypothesize that (i) fluctuating temperature stress will very differently affect marine organisms as compared to constant stress of the same mean intensity, and that (ii) the two additional dimensions of a stress regime, stress intensity (amplitude) and stress duration (frequency), will determine the biological impact. We will also analyse temperature time series of coastal Baltic Sea habitats with respect to shifts in any of these dimensions. By analysing on-going shifts in fluctuations in the context of sensitivities of organisms, observed from the lab experiments, we will be able to make more realistic predictions of climate change impacts on ecosystems.