Trends in Research on the Possible Effects of Climate Change Concerning Aquatic Ecosystems With Special Emphasis on the Modelling Approach

Abstract

Abstract. Knowledge on the expected effects of climate change on aquatic ecosystems is defined by three ways. On the one hand, long-term observation in the field serves as a basis for the possible changes; on the other hand, the experimental approach may bring valuable pieces of information to the research field. The expected effects of climate change cannot be studied by empirical approach; rather mathematical models are useful tools for this purpose. Within this study, the main findings of field observations and their implications for future were summarized; moreover, the modelling approaches were discussed in a more detailed way. Some models try to describe the variation of physical parameters in a given aquatic habitat, thus our knowledge on their biota is confined to the findings based on our present observations. Others are destined for answering special issues related to the given water body. Complex ecosystem models are the keys of our better understanding of the possible effects of climate change. Basically, these models were not created for testing the influence of global warming, rather focused on the description of a complex system (e. g. a lake) involving environmental variables, nutrients. However, such models are capable of studying climatic changes as well by taking into consideration a large set of environmental variables. Mostly, the outputs are consistent with the assumptions based on the findings in the field. Since synthetized models are rather difficult to handle and require quite large series of data, the authors proposed a more simple modelling approach, which is capable of examining the effects of global warming. This approach includes weather dependent simulation modelling of the seasonal dynamics of aquatic organisms within a simplified framework.

Climate change and freshwater zooplankton: what does it boil down to?

“…Such an approach neglects some ultimate drivers and tends to focus on the core of the process, still it can provide fairly significant pieces of a puzzle when the overall system behavior is to be disentangled. Such models do not aimed at serving biological interpretation of mathematical operations, rather stress predictions of considerable applicability (e.g., Hufnagel and Gaál 2005;Sipkay et al 2008Sipkay et al , 2009Sipkay et al , 2012Vadadi-Fülöp et al 2009). …”

Heterotrophic organisms and viruses in the Oka River and Cheboksary Reservoir during the abnormally hot summer of 2010

“…Many works dedicated to analysis of the global warming effect on biological processes in fresh water bodies have been published in recent years (Mooij et al, 2005;Sipkay et al, 2009). Nevertheless, there are only few works dealing with the possible effect of global warming on heterotrophic microorganisms (Rae and Vincent, 1998;Christoffersen et al, 2006).…”

Climate and Energy Policy in Hungary

“…This region has been selected because it is rich in environmental values (protected, Ramsar sites, Natura 2000 areas, Lake Tisza, Tisza), coupled with economical and social problems and a significant Romani population, making it suitable for the complex evaluation of the interdependences. The environmental values, biodiversity and natural ecosystems play special role in sustainability especially from the aspect of climate change [69,70]. One focal point of this examination was climate change on the local level especially dealing with the opinion of local stakeholders about energy efficiency and energy consciousness.…”