Marco Scotti

• Ph.D. in Ecology
• Research Associate at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel

Marine heatwaves have caused massive mortality in coastal benthic ecosystems, altering community composition. Here, we aim to understand the effects of single and sequential sublethal heatwaves in a temperate benthic ecosystem, investigating their disturbance on various levels of ecological hierarchy, i.e. individual physiology, trophic groups’ bio...

Legal requirement in Europe asks for Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in European seas, including consideration of trophic interactions and minimization of negative impacts of fishing on food webs and ecosystem functioning. This study presents the first mass-balanced ecosystem model focused on the western Baltic Sea (WBS). Results show t...

Empirical evidence of the theoretically expected trends of ecosystem development is scarce so far. In this research, we used long-term empirical data about the plankton community of a small mountain lake (Lake Santo, northern Apennines, Italy) to reconstruct its developmental trajectory during a period comprised between early 1970 s and 2010 s. We...

Warming is one of the most dramatic aspects of climate change and threatens future ecosystem functioning. It may alter primary productivity and thus jeopardize carbon sequestration, a crucial ecosystem service provided by coastal environments. Fucus vesiculosus is an important canopy-forming macroalga in the Baltic Sea, and its main consumer is Ido...

The arange and biomass distribution of marine fish species offer insights into their underlying niches. Quantitative data are rare compared to occurrences and remain underused in species distribution models (SDMs) to explore realized niches—the actual space occupied by a species shaped by abiotic and biotic factors. Local densities drive difference...

This review evaluates the current knowledge of essential biological traits (diet, fecundity, maturity, length-weight relationships, spawning, growth, lifespan, and natural mortality) of marine fishes across European and adjacent waters. These traits are crucial for ecosystem modeling and stock assessments. Using data from FishBase, the largest and...

The increasing numbers of offshore wind farm (OWF) projects question the impacts of such infrastructures on the social-ecological system (SES) in which they are to be constructed. Some answers can be given using qualitative modeling and loop analysis. We used participatory modeling to co-construct a qualitative model of the socio-ecosystem together...

In Colombia, the long-lasting internal conflict heavily shaped the socio-ecological context and imposed relationships that persisted after the peace agreement was signed in 2016. One question of interest is whether policies or interventions conceived to attain desirable goals for the post-conflict society may be effective or, rather, if the constra...

Marine fisheries are increasingly impacted by climate change, affecting species distribution and productivity, and necessitating urgent adaptation efforts. Climate vulnerability assessments (CVA), integrating expert knowledge, are vital for identifying species that could thrive or suffer under changing environmental conditions. This study presents...

Aim: The range and biomass distribution of marine fish species offer insights into their underlying niches. Quantitative data are rare compared to occurrences and remain underused in species distribution models (SDMs) to explore patterns of realized niches– the actual space occupied by a species shaped by abiotic and biotic factors. Local densities...

The Falkland Shelf is a highly productive ecosystem in the Southwest Atlantic Ocean. It is characterized by upwelling oceanographic dynamics and displays a wasp-waist structure, with few intermediate trophic-level species and many top predators that migrate on the shelf for feeding. One of these resident intermediate trophic-level species, the Pata...

Multiple stressors often act concomitantly on ecosystems but detection of species responses follows the "single species-single driver" strategy, and cumulative impacts are seldom considered. During 1990-2010, multiple perturbations in the Caspian Sea, led to the decline of kilka, sturgeon and Caspian seal populations. Specific causes for their coll...

The expansion of scientific image data holds great promise to quantify individuals, size distributions and traits. Computer vision tools are especially powerful to automate data mining of images and thus have been applied widely across studies in aquatic and terrestrial ecology. Yet marine benthic communities, especially infauna, remain understudie...

Available information and potential data gaps for non-fish marine organisms (cnidarians, crustaceans, echinoderms, molluscs, sponges, mammals, reptiles, and seabirds) covered by the global database SeaLifeBase were reviewed for eight marine ecosystems (Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea, Baltic Sea, Bay of Biscay/Celtic Sea/Iberian Coast, Black Sea, North Se...

Ecosystem-based management for marine life conservation is of growing consensus, although the focus on protecting either charismatic or commercially important species still persist, understating species playing key functional roles. Here we quantified the topological importance of species with high economic or conservation value by simulating extin...

The aim of this work is to present the food web models developed using the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) software tool to describe structure and functioning of various European marine ecosystems (eastern, central and western Mediterranean Sea; Black Sea; Bay of Biscay, Celtic Sea and Iberian coast; Baltic Sea; North Sea; English Channel, Irish Sea and...

Key traits of functional biodiversity are examined for 31,134 species of fishes. These traits are maximum body weight, productivity, and trophic level. A new, simple framework is presented that shows the combined usage of these traits, in ordinal categories, for close to 90% of extant species of fishes. Most species are clustered tightly along an e...

The LevinsAnalysis package is a collection of functions to analyse the structure and nodal interaction levels and single-paths information present within a stable Ecological Community Network. It allows to compute predictions about the response of variables to press perturbations in one or more entry points in the Community Network using the loo...

Temperate fisheries grounds are exposed to compound effects of jellyfish proliferations and fishing pressure, which affect local fisheries, cause economic losses, and threaten seafood supply. Here, we quantify the interlink between climate variability and jellyfish blooms and their impact on the Japanese anchovy (Engraulis japonicus), in the Korean...

Forest soils harbour a vast array of organisms that govern the processing of organic matter. Through their trophic interactions, they give rise to carbon flows that sustain soil ecosystem functioning. Understanding how soil food webs shape carbon flows may enhance our knowledge about the role of biodiversity on soil processes. In this work, we asse...

Ecosystem models need to capture biodiversity, because it is a fundamental determinant of food web dynamics and consequently of the cycling of energy and matter in ecosystems. In oceanic food webs, the plankton compartment encompasses by far most of the biomass and diversity. Therefore, capturing plankton diversity is paramount for marine ecosystem...

Climate change and deoxygenation are affecting fish stocks on a global scale, but disentangling the impacts of these stressors from the effects of overfishing is a challenge. This study was conducted to distinguish between climate change and mismanagement as possible causes for the drastic decline in spawning stock size and reproductive success in...

To identify the environmental factors that drive plankton community composition and structure in coastal waters, a shallow northwestern Mediterranean lagoon was monitored from winter to spring in two contrasting years. The campaign was based on high-frequency recordings of hydrological and meteorological parameters and weekly samplings of nutrients...

To identify the environmental factors that drive plankton community composition and structure in coastal waters, a shallow northwestern Mediterranean lagoon was monitored from winter to spring in two contrasting years. The campaign was based on high-frequency recordings of hydrological and meteorological parameters and weekly samplings of nutrients...

The sustainable management of social–ecological systems (SESs) requires that we understand the complex structure of relationships and feedbacks among ecosystem components and socioeconomic entities. Therefore, the construction and analysis of models integrating ecological and human actors is crucial for describing the functioning of SESs, and quali...

Microbial food web organisms are at the base of the functioning of pelagic ecosystems and support the whole marine food web. They are very reactive to environmental changes and their interactions are modified in response to different productive periods such as phytoplankton bloom and non-bloom as well as contrasted climatic years. To study ecologic...

Coastal marine resources provide livelihoods to human communities around the world. The interactions in respective social-ecological systems are usually of complex nature, due to a wide range of different fisheries interacting with the ecosystem. Understanding connectivity within these systems (i.e. among social and ecological actors) helps in esta...

Fluctuations in abundance of dominant species can cause competitive release of resources with consequences on community structure and functioning. In the present study, changes in the intertidal macroinfauna community of an exposed sandy beach were evaluated during two contrasting periods characterized by low and high densities of the yellow clam A...

Anthropic activities impact ecosystems worldwide thus contributing to the rapid erosion of biodiversity. The failure of traditional strategies targeting single species highlighted ecosystems as the most suitable scale to plan biodiversity management. Network analysis represents an ideal tool to model interactions in ecosystems and centrality indice...

Ecological processes modulate ecosystem functioning and services. Foundation species are those exerting intense control on such processes as both their existence and loss have profound implications on the structure of ecological communities. For the distinction between random fluctuations and directional regime shifts in community composition, long...

The ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi has invaded various habitats of European Seas in the last 40 years heavily effecting local ecosystems (Bodini et al. 2018). The ability to tolerate a broad range of temperatures, salinity and oxygen, fast growing and short reproductive cycles and various migration vectors have promoted the spread of the species. Nev...

The link between ecology and reproductive isolation constitutes the cornerstone of the ecological hypothesis of speciation. Such a link can arise when traits under ecologically based selection are also used as cues for mating ('magic traits') or as a by-product of habitat choice when mating takes place within habitats. Here, we propose that behavio...

Food chains in the pelagic zones of oceans and lakes are longer than in terrestrial ecosystems. The perception of the pelagic food web has become increasingly complex by progressing from a linear food chain (phytoplankton – crustacean zooplankton – planktivorous fish – predatory fish) to a food web because of an increasing appreciation of microbial...

The maintenance and resilience of host-associated microbiota during development is a fundamental process influencing the fitness of many organisms. Several host properties were identified as influencing factors on bacterial colonization, including the innate immune system, mucus composition, and diet. In contrast, the importance of bacteria–bacteri...

Climate change will not only shift environmental means but will also increase the intensity of extreme events, exerting additional stress on ecosystems. While field observations on the ecological consequences of heat waves are emerging, experimental evidence is rare, and lacking at the community level. Using a novel "near-natural" outdoor mesocosms...

Adaptive Food Webs is a synthesis of talks from the fourth decadal conference on food webs, after the publishing of the seminal book by Robert May entitled Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. It embraces the notion of food webs as being complex adaptive systems by exploring dynamic structures and processes, through both changes in externa...

Folate-mediated one-carbon metabolism (FOCM) is an interconnected network of metabolic pathways, including those required for the de novo synthesis of dTMP and purine nucleotides and for remethylation of homocysteine to methionine. Mouse models of folate-responsive neural tube defects (NTDs) indicate that impaired de novo thymidylate (dTMP) synthes...

PurposeThe consequential inventory modeling approach for life cycle assessment implies that an increase in the demand for a specific product is met by the marginal suppliers within the market. The identification of marginal suppliers is however complicated by difficulties in defining appropriate geographical market delimitations. In this study, an...

Introduction The dynamical behavior of individuals in ecosystems involves a multifaceted set of interaction types and processes that take place at different hierarchical levels. We present an individual-based, stochastic model that considers species dynamics at three hierarchical levels: population, community, and metacommunity. We use an individua...

Introduction Trophic interactions are one of the most important aspects shaping ecological communities, and the food-web paradigm has played a major role in the development of ecology as a science. Early food-web models attempted to simulate the flow of energy and biomass within local communities (Odum, 1956) or describe the structure of feeding re...

Individual-Based Modeling in Conservation Biology A major challenge for food-web research is studying diversity and variability more explicitly. This means a focus on individual-level variability in populations (Bolnick et al., 2011) that hopefully might help to better understand how structural properties predict dynamical behavior (Dunne, 2006). O...

Ecosystem Based Management (EBM) aims to support the protection of natural ecosystems and to improve economic activities. It requires considering all of the actors interacting in social-ecological systems (e.g., fish and fishers) in the understanding that their interplay determines the dynamic behavior of the single actors as well as that of the sy...

Among the genetic factors known to increase the risk of late onset Alzheimer’s diseases (AD), the presence of the apolipoproteine e4 (APOE4) allele has been recognized as the one with the strongest effect. However, despite decades of research, the pathogenic role of APOE4 in Alzheimer’s disease has not been clearly elucidated yet. In order to inves...

We studied the response of the heterotrophic flagellate (HF) community to the combined impact of warming and ocean acidification in a mesocosm experiment with a plankton community from the western Baltic Sea. We performed a quantitative analysis of the response at the level of total biomass and size classes and a semi-quantitative one at the level...

High Nature Value Farmland (HNVF) is commonly associated with low intensity agricultural systems. HNVFs cover ~32% of the agricultural land in Europe and are of strategic importance for the European Union policy since they are reservoirs of biodiversity and provide several ecosystem services. Carbon sequestration is an important service that can be...

The involvement of vitamins and other micronutrients in intermediary metabolism was elucidated in the mid 1900's at the level of individual biochemical reactions. Biochemical pathways remain the foundational knowledgebase for understanding how micronutrient adequacy modulates health in all life stages. Current daily recommended intakes were usually...

A high caloric diet, in conjunction with low levels of physical activity, promotes obesity. Many studies are available regarding the relation between dietary saturated fats and the etiology of obesity, but most focus on liver, muscle and white adipose tissue. Furthermore, the majority of transcriptomic studies seek to identify linear effects of an...

Coexisting bacteria form various microbial communities in human body parts. In these ecosystems they interact in various ways and the properties of the interaction network can be related to the stability and functional diversity of the local bacterial community. In this study, we analyze the interaction network among bacterial OTUs in 11 locations...

Biogenic, seasonal, and stochastic fluctuations at various scales characterize coastal marine habitats and modulate environmental stress. The relevance of most past studies into climate change impacts is weakened by the usually intentional exclusion of fluctuations from the experimental design. We describe a new outdoor mesocosm system for benthic...

Rarity of species is often considered to set priorities for biodiversity conservation. Less abundant species are expected to be at higher risk of extinction and make significant contribution to food web functioning. However, the relationship between species abundance and position in food webs is still unclear. Here we tested possible correlations b...

In complex ecosystem models, relationships between species include a large number of direct interactions and indirect effects. In order to unveil some simple and better understandable relationships, it is useful to study the asymmetry of inter-specific effects. We present a simple approach for this based on stochastic food web simulations from prev...

Ecosystems and their biodiversity have to be protected and preserved as sources of services and goods. The human population con-trols and modifies ecosystems to improve its health conditions and wel-fare. The consequences of human activities should be carefully monitored and ecosystems should be managed to protect all of the species and preserve th...

One source of complexity in ecological systems is the hierarchical organization of parallel biological processes. Our 'horizontal' knowledge describing different levels is quite massive, but the understand-ing of their vertical interactions is very poor. We present a toy model linking social networks, food webs and a landscape graph. Horizontal pro...

Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia worldwide, affecting the elderly population. It is characterized by the hallmark pathology of amyloid-β deposition, neurofibrillary tangle formation, and extensive neuronal degeneration in the brain. Wealth of data related to Alzheimer's disease has been generated to date, nevertheless, the m...

Folate-mediated one-carbon metabolism (FOCM) is associated with risk for numerous pathological states including birth defects, cancers, and chronic diseases. Although the enzymes that constitute the biological pathways have been well described and their interdependency through the shared use of folate cofactors appreciated, the biological mechanism...

New insights into the sustainable use of natural resources in human systems can be gained through comparison with ecosystems via common indices. In both kinds of system, resources are processed by a number of users within a network, but we consider ecosystems as the only ones displaying sustainable patterns of growth and development. This study aim...

Network models are traditional in community ecology. For example, they provide a rich analytical toolkit to put higher predators into a multispecies context. Better understanding their top-down effects and the potential bottom-up control on them would be of key importance for predictive ecosystem management. Food web architecture may be used to pre...

Network science is the key to managing social communities, designing the structure of efficient organizations and planning for sustainable development. This book applies network science to contemporary social policy problems. In the first part, tools of diffusion and team design are deployed to challenges in adoption of ideas and the management of...

There is an increasing body of literature on the topological analysis of modules (motifs, building blocks) in different networks. Most of these results are of descriptive, comparative and statistical nature, while dynamical simulations of their behaviour are missing. We present a stochastic food web simulation and study the relative strength of dif...

Energy security of natural gas supplies in Europe is becoming a key concern. As demand increases, infrastructure development focuses on extending the capacity of the pipeline system. While conventional approaches focus mainly on source dependence, we argue for a network perspective to also consider risks associated with transit countries, by borrow...

Food webs are schematic representations of who eats whom in ecosystems. They are widely used in linking process to pattern (e.g., degree distribution and vulnerability) and investigating the roles played by particular species within the interaction web (e.g., centrality indices and trophic position). First, I present the dominator tree, a topologic...

Vitamin associations of proteins in Escherichia coli.

Edgelist summarizing the 2,672 undirected interactions between the 1,657 proteins of the giant component. Each line of the edgelist describes an interaction between the proteins identified by the column labels protein1 and protein2.

For the 200 vitamin-related proteins we tested whether the number of interactions is determined by the number of publications associated with a given vitamin. We found that the structure of the PPI network is independent from the literature. We also analyzed patterns of vitamin associations in four organisms, observing how human differs from mouse,...

Vitamin associations of proteins in mouse (Mus musculus).

Correlation matrices describing the Goodman-Kruskal's lambda values for null models of network connectivity. These correlations between the rankings are used to construct dendrograms for each type of null model. Dendrograms illustrate the similarities between centralities (i.e., when protein orderings measured with two indices are similar, and thei...

This table includes details about the initial list of 200 vitamin-related proteins. These proteins were used as a reference for constructing the vitamin PPI network and are listed in alphabetical order. The first two columns indicate UniProtKB accession numbers and UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot entry names, while the third column describes vitamin associati...

This table provides the centrality values computed for the 1,657 proteins of the giant component. Proteins are in alphabetical order and the 22 most central proteins are highlighted in yellow. Centrality indices included are: D = degree; EC = eigenvector score; TI1 = topological importance up to 1 step; TI4 = topological importance up to 4 steps; B...

Vitamin associations of proteins in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).