Towards Integrating Evolution, Metabolism, and Climate Change Studies of Marine Ecosystems

Abstract

Global environmental changes are challenging the structure and functioning of ecosystems. However, a mechanistic understanding of how global environmental changes will affect ecosystems is still lacking. The complex and interacting biological and physical processes spanning vast temporal and spatial scales that constitute an ecosystem make this a formidable problem. A unifying framework based on ecological theory, that considers fundamental and realized niches, combined with metabolic, evolutionary, and climate change studies, is needed to provide the mechanistic understanding required to evaluate and forecast the future of marine communities, ecosystems, and their services. The Future of Marine Ecosystems The ocean absorbs most (93%) of the heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in a predicted increase in the sea surface temperature of 1-10 C over the next 100 years [1]. The ocean also absorbs CO 2 released to the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources (currently 1/3 of this CO 2), resulting in a profound change in the carbonate chemistry and predicted increased acidity of seawater [1] to 100-150% above pre-industrial era values [1]. In addition to ocean warming and acidification, anthropogenic stressors are decreasing the concentration of dissolved oxygen and consequently expanding oxygen minimum zones [2] as well as potentially modifying large-scale oceanic circulation patterns [3]. These environmental changes might also impact fundamental community-structuring processes (i.e., selection, dispersal, drift, and speciation) [4], changing the relative importance of ecological processes for structuring of communities. Collectively, these changes will alter the structure and functioning of marine organisms and ecosystems and, consequently, the biogeochemical cycles of the ocean [5-8]. Generally recognized predictions regarding climate-induced changes on the composition and distribution of the marine biota include shifts in the species distribution from lower to higher latitudes, shifts from near-surface to deeper waters, shifts in annual phenology, declines in calcifying species, and increases in the abundance of warm-water species [1,9]. However, most models of the response of biological communities to climate change assume a fixed, genetically determined environmental niche for each species, and the migration of intact (i.e., nonadapting or nonevolving) populations, so that their distribution on our future planet is basically governed by the environmental conditions [10-12]. Yet, local populations may evolve, acclimate, and adapt to environmental changes. In fact, local adaptation is a recognized phenomenon in ecological studies on terrestrial systems [13,14]. In contrast to terrestrial systems where most (z96%) of the living biomass are plants, most of the biomass of the ocean (z70%) is microbial [15]. Since microbes have short generation times and large population sizes, it is possible that these engines of the Earth's biogeochemical cycles might be particularly capable of adapting to global envir...

The evolution of trait correlations constrains phenotypic adaptation to high CO2in a eukaryotic alga

“…Importantly, this approach can also help inform future experimental designs aimed at testing the probability of adaptive outcomes across multivariate environments through the analysis of a select set of traits. We are at a critical juncture where we need ecosystem and biogeochemical models to incorporate evolutionary dynamics in order to robustly predict future shifts in ecosystem dynamics [ 33 ]. Due to the seemingly infinite amount of possible interacting biological and environmental variables to test, evolutionary and mathematical tools that allow us to efficiently combine experiments with modelling will be critical to help predict microbial population responses to future global change scenarios through the lens of evolutionary phenomena.…”

The evolution of trait correlations constrains phenotypic adaptation to high CO2in a eukaryotic alga

“…We are at a critical juncture where we need ecosystem and biogeochemical models to incorporate evolutionary dynamics in order to robustly predict future shifts in ecosystem dynamics [33]. Due to the seemingly infinite amount of possible interacting biological and environmental variables to test, evolutionary and mathematical tools that allow us to efficiently combine experiments with modeling will be critical to help predict microbial population responses to future global change scenarios through the lens of evolutionary phenomena.…”

“…In summary, a growing body of literature has shown that genetic architecture influences how traits and trait correlations are impacted by environmental shifts and that these shifts produce nonrandom distributions of phenotypes [29][30][31]. These studies have substantial consequences for understanding future shifts in marine phytoplankton function and thus carbon cycling and global climate [32,33]. However, there have been few attempts to investigate the implications of this phenomenon for the evolution of trait and trait correlations of photosynthetic microbes [19,20].…”

Bioinformatics for Marine Products: An Overview of Resources, Bottlenecks, and Perspectives

“…Often, organism reactions to a changing condition include the remodeling of their metabolism and regulating the levels of specific metabolites, which can potentially represent markers of a particular response (e.g., biotic or abiotic stresses). In this context, metabolomics helps the evaluation of the impact of climate changes on marine organisms, unraveling contributions that marine systems could play in mitigating the effects of global warming [259,260].…”