Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are thought to be acidifying and warming Earth’s oceans, causing significant changes to marine and terrestrial ecosystems around the world. But many forecasts of future changes to ecosystems have been based on simplified laboratory experiments that include few or even just a single species.
“Looking at individual organisms gives you a very isolated if not distorted picture, so to really understand how communities are responding to global change, you need to go to community-level experimentation,” says biological oceanographer Ulf Riebesell of GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.
Riebesell and marine ecologist Ivan Nagelkerken of the University of Adelaide in Australia are among the researchers now employing mesocosm experiments—a method that straddles the divide between field- and laboratory-based approaches to allow the study of naturalistic environments under controlled conditions.
While mesocosms themselves are not a novel concept, says Nagelkerken, “they have hardly ...
