B.D.H.K. (Britas Klemens) Eriksson, Prof

Research Interests I am interested in the interaction between humans and our natural habitat: specifically, which impact we have on aquatic ecosystems and the communities therein, what properties that promote desirable ecosystem states, and ultimately how we can make sustainable use of aquatic resources. Promoting desirable ecosystem states: I use experimental methods to test the function of different biological properties for community-responses to human impacts. For example, if the number of species, species functional traits or the presence of important species groups control effects of nutrient enrichment. I am especially interested in what biological properties are important sources of community resilience*; i. e. what biological factors increase resistance of the communities to change or increase the ability to regenerate functions in the system after a disturbance, and thereby prohibit the system from collapsing into an undesirable state.
Conclusions from such experiments will promote the understanding of ecological resilience*, which is essential to sustain and repair aquatic ecosystems in the future and thereby secure important resources on which we depend. * Note: Resilience = the amount of disturbance a system can absorb without changing to another state of attraction. The three themes of the research group: Consequences of predator declines for coastal resilience to eutrophication: Participants: Katrin Sieben PhD; Cooperating partners: Ulf Bergström, Lars Ljungren & Alfred Sandström – Swedish Board of Fisheries. In this project we study how important predator communities are  for food-web structure and function. We test how predator diversity through different degrees of omnivory and carnivory, influence top-down control in benthic communities. In this project we also specifically explore the impacts on marine communities from the documented large-scale and world-wide eutrophication of aquatic habitats the last 50-60 years, and an even historically longer strong exploitation of marine resources (fishing and hunting). Consequences of ecosystem engineers for the trophic structure and recovery potential of the Wadden Sea ecosystem: Participants: Serena Donadi PhD, Johan Eklöv post-doc; Cooperating partners: Theunis Piersma, Els van der Zee –Animal Ecology, University of Groningen; Han Olff, Tjisse van der Heide – Cocon, University of Groningen. Henk van der Veer, Johan van der Koppel – NIOZ. In this project we study interactions between benthic soft-bottom communities dominated by ecosystem engineers and local resource conditions. We suggests that feedbacks between ecosystem engineers and local resource conditions generate alternative stable benthic communities with distinctly different trophic structures and function. We specifically study engineering effects of sediment destabilizing ecosystem engineers (seagrass, mussels, cockles) and sediment stabilizing suspension feeders (polychaete worms), and how such relations may be modified by human impacts on sediment stability (dredging, trawling, engineering). The relation between biodiversity and resilience in source-sink meta communities: Participants: Karin de Boer post-doc. Cooperating partners: Birte Matthiesen, Lena Eggers – Leibnitz Institute for Marine Sciences. Helmut Hillebrand  - Planktologie, University of Oldenburg. In this project we aim to predict consequences of species loss for the ability of communities to cope with environmental stress and disturbances, i.e. community resilience. To test this we establish meta communities consisting of connected habitats of marine benthic microalgae in the laboratory. This means allowing for patch-dynamics by including environmental disturbance and dispersal, which are natural processes that promote species coexistence – but are so far neglected processes when it comes to biodiversity-ecosystem function experiments. Master research projects There is a number of master research projects available within the above subjects.

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