Aquatic ecosystems Structure And Production in a warming and fluctuating world – ASAP

Nutrition and temperature are the major drivers of ectotherm performance. In the context of global warming, the interaction between such factors may exacerbate constraints on aquatic consumer growth and may decrease aquatic systems productivity much more that it is expected today. In aquatic systems, the higher average temperatures will directly or indirectly increase the food quantity and food quality constraints on consumers who will also have to deal in the same time with higher daily thermal variability and more intense and longer heat periods. As trophic transfer efficiencies at the microbe-metazoan interface determine the structure and production of aquatic ecosystems, our project will focus on this trophic interface to investigate how mean temperature and thermal variance will affect microbial communities food quality traits under various predation pressures as well as consumers performance under various nutritional contexts. Our project first aims to establish a theoretical framework that could predict consumer performance in a context of thermal variance and extreme temperatures. Secondly it aims to decipher which factors affect microbial food quality, dynamic and resilience to thermal variability and extreme heat periods. Endly, confronting our theoretical models to high frequency acquired field datas, we plan to evaluate how the ASAP project will improve our capacity to predict aquatic systems structure and production in a warming and fluctuating world.