Bio-ORACLE is a set of GIS rasters providing geophysical, biotic and environmental data for surface and benthic marine realms. The data are available for global-scale applications at a spatial resolution of 5 arcmin (approximately 9.2 km at the equator).
Linking biodiversity occurrence data to the physical and biotic environment provides a framework to formulate hypotheses about the ecological processes governing spatial and temporal patterns in biodiversity, which can be useful for marine ecosystem management and conservation.
Ocean acidification and greenhouse warming will interactively influence competitive success of key phytoplankton groups such as diatoms, but how long-term responses to global change will affect community structure is unknown. We incubated a mixed natural diatom community from coastal New Zealand waters in a short-term (two-week) incubation experiment using a factorial matrix of warming and/or elevated pCO2 and measured effects on community structure.
Diatoms are often considered to be a single functional group, yet there is a great deal of morphological, genetic and ecological diversity within the class. How these differences will translate into species-specific responses to rapid changes in the ocean environment resulting from climate change and eutrophication is currently poorly understood.