Life traits in the nekton assemblage: a comparison between effects of Climate Change on Adriatic Sea and Barents Sea

Abstract

Global warming and global environmental changes are impacting marine ecosystems and altering species distributions and interactions. In ecology, trait-based approaches are useful and efficient in order to understand what determine species distributions and the relationship with the environment. Fishes’ life-histories and traits distributions can also be used to predict future responses to environmental changes. This thesis is going to analyse life traits histories of the nekton communities of North Adriatic Sea, between 1945 and 2019 to perform temporal distribution analysis, between 2016 and 2019 to perform spatial distribution analysis, with R-software and GIS. The spatial-temporal distribution of Adriatic nekton communities will be compared with the Barents Sea nekton communities’ distribution. With global warming, species redistribute to more suitable areas, affecting the persistence of resident species, modifying biodiversity and ecosystem function. North Adriatic Sea and Barents Sea represent two different situation: the first one is a sea open only to the south, where sub-tropical species can enter, but also where boreal species cannot escape from rising temperature; in the second case, the sea is open, therefore boreal species could replace local arctic species, without causing necessarily their extinction.