Impacts of climate-driven changes in fish distributions on contaminants exposure and accumulation in marine food webs

Impacts of climate-driven changes in fish distributions on contaminants exposure and accumulation
in marine food webs
Marine fish play a vital role in marine food webs, including as food to iconic top predators such as
marine mammals and seabirds. They are also exposed to a wide range of contaminants, and may
accumulate these and transfer them to their predators. This project will investigate how the relative
risk of exposure to contaminants varies between fish species, how this risk will change as fish species
distributions track our changing climate and as fish communities are reorganised, and what the
implications of this are for the wider marine food web, ecosystem functions and services. In a novel
collaboration between marine macroecology and ecotoxicology, the project will involve analysis of
existing big biological and chemical data using a range of computational techniques e.g.
meta-analysis, systematic reviews of existing data, modelling, and ecoinformatics. The focus will
initially be on the North Sea, which is characterised by multiple human pressures, including chemical
contaminants and rapid warming, but which also supplies important ecosystem services, many of
them mediated through its fish communities. The North Sea is also among the most well-monitored
and data-rich marine ecosystems in the world, and the increasing open availability of biological,
chemical, and climate data products produced by national and European initiatives make the big data
approaches that are central to this project extremely timely.