A mesocosm concept for the simulation of near-natural shallow underwater climates: The Kiel Outdoor Benthocosms (KOB)

Martin Wahl, Björn Buchholz, Vera Winde, Dar Golomb, Tamar Guy-Haim, Jens Müller, Gil Rilov, Marco Scotti, Michael E. Böttcher

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Biogenic, seasonal, and stochastic fluctuations at various scales characterize coastal marine habitats and modulate environmental stress. The relevance of most past studies into climate change impacts is weakened by the usually intentional exclusion of fluctuations from the experimental design. We describe a new outdoor mesocosm system for benthic research ("benthocosms") which permit the control and manipulation of several environmental variables while admitting all natural in situ fluctuations. This is achieved by continuously measuring the relevant variables (e.g., temperature, pH, O2, CO2) in situ, defining these in real time as reference values in the control software and simulating target climates by delta treatments. The latter constitute the manipulative addition of predefined changes (e.g., "warming", "acidification") to the reference values. We illustrate the performance of the system by presenting the environmental data of four seasonal experiments which together represent an entire year. The "Kiel Outdoor Benthocosms" allow realizing near-natural climate change experiments on complex benthic communities under controlled scenarios.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)651-663
Number of pages13
JournalLimnology and Oceanography: Methods
Volume13
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Nov 2015
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Ocean Engineering

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A mesocosm concept for the simulation of near-natural shallow underwater climates: The Kiel Outdoor Benthocosms (KOB)'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this