Higher Trophic Levels in the Southern North Sea
Trophos aims at studying the processes that structure the higher trophic levels in the North Sea ecosystem. Research will include food web interactions shaping the benthic communities and involves the use of natural stable isotopes and tracers. These tracers make it possible to unravel how food cascades into animal biomass. Special attention will be given to the fate of Phaeocystis. Inverse modeling allows quantifying the food web flows. As a second topic, dispersal mechanisms on the BCS will be studied, since they are of great importance for those species having a pelagic life-style or pelagic larvae. Lagrangian modeling of particles in a 3-D hydrodynamical model will be coupled with high-resolution genotyping of the animal populations in space and time. Causal aspects of the distribution of seabirds will be investigated by linking their distribution to the temporal, horizontal and vertical distribution of pelagic fish that serve as food for fish-eating seabirds.