Urbanisation supplements ecosystem functioning in disturbed estuaries

Physical ecosystem engineers and the functioning of estuaries and coasts

7.07 Use of Stable Isotopes to Understand Food Webs and Ecosystem Functioning in Estuaries

Stable isotopes have been extensively used to trace element cycles and their incorporation into food webs. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the principles of using stable isotopes as natural or deliberate tracers in estuarine systems, with a focus on (1) assessing the origin and cycling of organic and inorganic elements (mainly carbon and nitrogen), (2) defining estuarine food webs...

Influence of benthic macrofauna community shifts on ecosystem functioning in shallow estuaries

*Correspondence: Erik Kristensen, Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] We aim at identifying how ecosystem functioning in shallow estuaries is affected by rapid shifts in benthic fauna communities. We use the shallow estuary, Odense Fjord, Denmark, as a case study to test our hypotheses that (1) shifts in benthic fa...

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning

Species diversity is a major determinant of ecosystem productivity, stability, invasibility, and nutrient dynamics. Hundreds of studies spanning terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems show that high-diversity mixtures are approximately twice as productive as monocultures of the same species and that this difference increases through time. These impacts of higher diversity have multiple cau...

Role of network analysis in comparative ecosystem ecology of estuaries

Assessments of trophic structure through ecological network analysis (ENA) have been done in a wide variety of estuarine and coastal environments. For example, some have used it to compare trophic structures within ecosystems focusing on temporal conditions (Baird and Ulanowicz 1989; Baird et al. 1998) and among ecosystems focusing on spatial conditions (e.g. Baird and Ulanowicz 1993; Christens...