Drivers of biodiversity loss in the Eastern Mediterranean
The Eastern Mediterranean Sea is a region where climate warming, extreme weather events, and biological invasions interact, resulting in the most dramatic loss of native species documented to date in the marine realm. Despite the potentially severe consequences for local ecosystems and their services provided to society, our understanding of the process and the role of individual stressors is severely limited by the lack of long-term data needed to assess changes over time. In this project, we will overcome this impediment by combining observational and paleontological data to obtain a sufficiently deep temporal coverage. Focusing on molluscs and fishes, two ecologically and economically important groups, we will investigate the timing of changes to biodiversity on the Israel shelf, the relative importance of its major drivers and attempt predictions in future climate scenarios.
Funding: Austrian Science Fund, additional information here.
Marine biogeography of Cyprus
Cyprus lies in the eastern Mediterranean and has a broad range of water temperatures despite its comparatively limited size. We collected living and death molluscan assemblages around the island to quantify diversity, prevalence of non-indigenous species, diversity loss and correlate it with water temperature to determine its role in shaping benthic diversity.
Funding: Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Austrian Science Fund.