Anna Gårdmark

I study the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of aquatic food-webs. My focus is how fish communities and food-webs respond to changing environments, and how these responses depend on their species interactions. The most interesting part is when we start acknowledging that interactions are not static! Individuals engage in different interactions during their life, often depending on their body size. And because how they grow depends on how much they eat, this leads to interesting feed-backs between how individuals interact with their environment (including other individuals, of same or other species) and how they in turn perform. This shapes dynamics of populations, communities and food-webs.

Together with my students and close colleagues I study how species interactions, and variation in these among individuals, determine e.g. responses to climate change and fishing, and how contaminants accumulate in food-webs. We also study how to detect this in natural populations and how to account for it in advice to e.g. fisheries management. Read more about our research and us here! We combine dynamic modelling with laboratory- and field mesocosm experiments, and develop novel time series methods and apply these to long-term fish community data, often in the Baltic Sea but also in lake systems and elsewhere.

Some ongoing projects are

• Effects of warming on fish communities & foodwebs
• Novel methods to detect climate change impacts in interaction species
• Size-dependent interactions and bioaccumulation of dioxins in fish
• Fish community responses to rising temperatures and darker waters
• Fish physiological responses to interacting climate stressors
• Novel time series methods & advice for management of exploited fish communities

Find out more about our research on climate change effects on fish communities here!

NEWS: 3 new papers on climate change impacts on fish & foodwebs and 3 new papers from marine observation data: food-web indicators, changes in functional diversity and linkages between prey abundance and consumer performance in the Baltic Sea. See publications.

PhD-students

• Viktor Thunell 2017-  Climate change impacts on dynamics of exploited
  fish communities
• Max Lindmark 2016-  How trophic interactions mediate physiological responses to climate change in food-webs
• Renee Van Dorst 2016-  Fish community responses to darker and warmer waters (co-supervisor)
• Philip Jacobson 2015-  Role of size-dependent resource- and habitat use for bioaccumulation (co-supervisor)

Previous PhD-students

• Ulrika Beier 2013-2016  Habitat selection and indirect interactions in fish communities

Post-doc mentoring

Post-doctoral fellows

• Wojciech Uszko 2019 Intra- & interspecific size responses to warming in zooplankton
• David Gilljam 2019- Evolutionary adaptations to warming in fish and eco-evolutionary dynamics
• Torbjörn Säterberg 2017, 2019- Approximating food-web filtering of climate change responses in data poor systems
•  
• Previous post-doctoral fellows
• Marian Torres 2014-2016  Developing pelagic food web indicators accounting for species interactions
• Grégoire Certain 2014-2016  Resolving climate change impacts on natural food-webs using multivariate time series approaches
• Magnus Huss 2009-2011  Effects of fishing on marine food-webs with size-dependent interactions
• Jens Olsson 2009-2010  Integrated Ecosystem Analyses of the Baltic Sea
• Anssi Vainikka 2006-2009  Fisheries-induced evolution of maturation in Baltic Sea fish

Looking for a MSc thesis project in community dynamics theory or aquatic food-web dynamics? Get in touch!

I publish with > 80 collaborators, so far in > 50 scientific articles, about 10 popular science articles and numerous export reports. Check Researchgate & Google Scholar for full list of publications and for citations.

Curious? Have a look at, for example:

• Huss, M,. Lindmark, M., van Dorst, R.M., Jacobson, P. & A. Gårdmark. 2019. Large-scale experimental evidence of gradual size-dependent shifts in body size and growth of fish in response to warming. Global Change Biology, (early view). doi: 10.1111/gcb.14637. open access here
• Lindmark, M., Ohlberger, J., Huss, M. & A. Gårdmark. 2019. Size-based ecological interactions drive food web responses to climate warming. Ecology Letters, 22: 778–786. doi: 10.1111/ ele.13235. open access here
• Van Dorst, R.M., Gårdmark, A., Svanbäck, R., Beier, U., Weyhenmeyer, G.A. & M. Huss. 2019. Warmer and browner waters decrease fish biomass production. Global Change Biology, 25(4), 1395-1408. doi: 10.1111/gcb.14551. open access here
• Karlsson, A.M.L., Gorokhova, E., Gårdmark, A., Pekcan-Hekim, Z., Casini, M., Albertsson, J., Sundelin, B., Karlsson, O. & L. Bergström. 2019. Linking consumer physiological status to food-web structure and prey food value in the Baltic Sea. AMBIO, (to come)
• Kadin, M., Blenckner, T., Casini, M., Gårdmark, A., Torres, M.A. & S.A. Otto. 2019. Trophic interactions, management trade-offs and climate change: the need for adaptive thresholds to operationalize ecosystem indicators. Frontiers in Marine Science, section Global Change and the Future Ocean. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2019.00249. open access here
• Törnroos, A., Pecuchet, L., Olsson, J., Gårdmark, A., Blomqvist, M., Lindegren, M. & E. Bonsdorff. 2019. Four decades of functional community change reveals gradual trends and low interlinkage across trophic groups in a large marine ecosystem. Global Change Biology, 25 (4), 1235-1246. doi: 10.1111/gcb.14552 open access here
• Lindmark, M., Huss, M., Ohlberger, J. & A. Gårdmark. 2018. Temperature-dependent body size effects on population responses to climate warming. Ecology Letters, 21, 181–189. doi: 10.1111/ele.12880 open access here
• Jacobson, P., Gårdmark, A., Östergren, J., Casini, M. & M. Huss. 2018. Size-dependent prey availability affects diet and performance of predatory fish at sea: a case study of Atlantic salmon. Ecosphere  9(1), e02081. doi: 10.1002/ecs2.2081 open access here
• Certain, G., Barraquand, F. & A. Gårdmark. 2018. How do MAR(1) models cope with hidden nonlinearities in ecological dynamics? Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 1-21. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.13021 open access here
   
• Svensson, F., Karlsson, E., Gårdmark, A., Olsson, J., Adill, A., Zie, J., Snoeijs, P. & Eklöf, J. S. 2017. In situ warming strengthens trophic cascades in a coastal food web. Oikos, 126:1150-1161. doi: 10.1111/oik.03773

• Torres, M.A., Casini, M., Huss, M., Otto, S.A., Kadin, M. & Gårdmark, A. 2017. Food-web indicators accounting for species interactions respond to multiple pressures. Ecological Indicators, 77, 67-79
• Casini, M., Käll, F., Hansson, M., Plikshs, M., Baranova, T., Karlsson, O., Lundström, K., Neuenfeldt, S., Gårdmark, A. & Hjelm, J. 2016. Dead zones, density-dependence and food limitation drive the body condition of a heavily exploited marine fish predator. Royal Society Open Science, 3, 160416. doi: 10.1098/rsos.160416.

• Gårdmark, A., Casini, M., Huss, M., Van Leeuwen, A., Hjelm, J., Persson, L. & de Roos, A. M. 2015. Regime shifts in exploited marine food-webs: detecting mechanisms underlying alternative stable states using size-structured community dynamics theory. Philosophical Transactions Royal Society, Series B, 370 (5), 20130262.

• Bernes, C., Carpenter, S.R., Gårdmark, A., Larsson, P., Persson, L., Skov, C., Speed, J.D.M. & Van Donk, E. 2015. What is the influence of a reduction of planktivorous and benthivorous fish on water quality in temperate eutrophic lakes? A systematic review. Environmental Evidence, 4 (7).

• Östman, Ö., Karlsson, O., Pönni, J., Kaljuste, O., Aho, T & Gårdmark, A. 2014. Ecosystem changes and eco-evolutionary dynamics in body size of herring (Clupea harengus) in the Bothnian Sea. Evolutionary Ecology Research, 16: 417-433.

• Huss, M., de Roos, A.M., van Leeuwen, A. & Gårdmark, A. 2014. Facilitation of fisheries by natural predators depends on life history of shared prey. Oikos, 23:1071-1080.

• Van Leeuwen, A., Gårdmark, A., Huss, M. & de Roos, A. M. 2014. Ontogenetic specialism in predators with multiple niche shifts prevents predator population recovery and establishment. Ecology, 95 (9), 2409-2422.

• Möllmann, C., Lindegren, M., Blenckner, T., Bergström, L., Casini, M., Diekmann, R., Flinkman, J., Müller-Karulis, B., Neuenfeldt, S., Schmidt, J. O., Tomczak, M. T., Voss, R. & Gårdmark, A. 2014. Implementing ecosystem-based fisheries management – from single-species to integrated ecosystem assessment and advice for Baltic Sea fish stocks. ICES Journal of Marine Sciences, 71 (5): 1187-1197.

• Gårdmark, A., Lindegren, M., Neuenfeldt, S., Blenckner, T., Heikinheimo, O., Müller-Karulis, B., Niiranen, S., Tomczak, M., Aro, E., Wikström, A. & Möllmann, C. 2013. Biological Ensemble Modelling to evaluate potential futures of living marine resources. Ecological Applications, 23(4), 742–754.

• Huss, M., de Roos, A.M., van Leeuwen, A., Casini, M. & Gårdmark, A. 2013. Cohort dynamics give rise to alternative stable community states. American Naturalist, 182(3), 374-392.

Curious of what’s up in the Baltic Sea food-webs or what happens in ecosystems when we fish? I happily give popular science talks, contribute to news articles popularing science or write popular science articles. Watch the SLU news site or get in touch.

Visit us on @FishinFoodwebs, Instagram, for news and fun research in our research group!

More on our research in FishinFoodwebs

You'll find me on ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Twitter.