How will life in the oceans respond to environmental change? With our increasing awareness and concern for human impact on the marine environment and its role in regulating global climate, the need for predicting the future of life in the ocean becomes pressing. The goal of Centre for Ocean Life was to develop a fundamental understanding and predictive capability of marine ecosystems.
The centre established a cross-disciplinary research activity and developed novel trait-based approaches and models to meet this goal.
The work was organized around three main research activities:
- Identification and mechanistic description of the traits and trade-offs required to characterize the various life forms in the ocean through experimental and theoretical work as well as analysis of literature data.
- Scaling of individual behavior to population and ecosystem dynamics through the development of trait-based models.
- Testing model prediction by comparing to observed trait patterns in the ocean.
The centre brought together biologists, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians from three Danish universities, funded PhD and postdoctoral fellows, offered PhD summer schools and international workshops, and operateed a Researcher Visitors Centre.
Centre for Ocean Life was a Villum Kann Rasmussen Centre of excellence for the study of life in a changing ocean. The centre opened on January 1, 2012 and closed on September 1, 2024. The centre director was Prof. Thomas Kiørboe and deputy director was Prof. Ken H. Andersen.
Reports
Examples of trait-based models
Here are examples of our trait-based models: