AGELESS

AGELESS is a research project, funded in 2024 for a duration of three years by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

This project will use long-term and fossil-record data on plankton diversity to develop a framework for the assessment and protection of biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Rationale

The research findings of recent decades point to significant changes in marine biodiversity: many species are shifting their habitat, leading to new interactions between species in different communities. At the same time, species diversity is declining globally. These developments can be detrimental, as marine biodiversity provides unique and important services to society. Therefore, an effective and science-based policy to protect marine biodiversity is essential. However, the response of biodiversity to climate change is complex and assessments are hampered by the short duration of observation periods, making it difficult to separate natural variability from climate-related trends. Furthermore, effective marine biodiversity conservation policy requires not only a better understanding of biodiversity dynamics, but also new governance processes and management approaches, such as dynamic, climate-appropriate marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction. Crucially, such policies require structured dialog and communication with stakeholder groups to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and decision-making needs and to ensure the practical relevance and uptake of scientific knowledge.

Overall goal

The interdisciplinary AGELESS project pursues three overall objectives:

1. The rich fossil record of marine plankton communities will be used to learn how marine biodiversity has responded to climate change in the past. Models will then be developed, tested and used to predict how anthropogenic climate change may alter and shift marine species communities in the future.
2. This research will be translated into practical policy measures, including effective tools and procedures to protect marine biodiversity.
3. Through knowledge transfer in decision-making and governance, this project aims to provide a platform that allows the use of past biodiversity information to be shared in the assessment of current and future biodiversity changes, the establishment of appropriate management approaches and targeted governance options.

Our contribution

AGELESS is a research consortium, consisting of several groups in Germany, including the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, and the University of Oldenburg.

The role of my research group in this consortium is the development of spatially explicit, size-structured models of paleo food-webs to investigate how climate change has impacted marine species across different trophic levels, from microplankton to megafauna. These models will describe species’ spatial ranges based on their climatic niche and body size, capturing predator-prey relationships and thermal affinities. By simulating colonization and extinction events within the food-web context, the models will predict species distributions and associated extinction cascades due to environmental changes. Using marine fossil records for calibration, these models will also guide the design of climate-smart marine protected areas (MPAs).