
Thomas Brey
Thomas Brey
Professor
Retired
former head of dept Functional Ecology
Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research
About
323
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (323)
Profound environmental changes, such as drastic sea-ice decline, leave large-scale ecological footprints on the distribution and composition of marine biota in the Arctic. Currently, the impact of such stressors is not sufficiently understood due to the lack of pan-Arctic data that allow for estimating ecological baselines as well as modelling curr...
At the end of their operational life time offshore wind farms need to be decommissioned. How and to what extent the removal of the underwater structures impairs the ecosystem that developed during the operational phase of the wind farm is not known. So, decision makers face a knowledge gap, making the consideration of such ecological impacts challe...
Profound environmental changes, such as drastic sea-ice decline, leave large-scale ecological footprints on the distribution and composition of marine biotas in the Arctic. Currently, the impact of such stressors is not sufficiently understood due to the lack of pan-Arctic data that allow for estimating ecological baselines, as well as modelling cu...
On 25 August 2022, the Zoologica Scripta ‐ An International Journal of Systematic Zoology and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters arranged a symposium entitled ‘The role of systematics for understanding ecosystem functions’ in the Academy's premises in Oslo, Norway. The symposium aimed at offering a forum for exploring and discussing tren...
Driven by climate change, marine biodiversity is undergoing a phase of rapid change that has proven to be even faster than changes observed in terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding how these changes in species composition will affect future marine life is crucial for conservation management, especially due to increasing demands for marine natural r...
Systematic long-term studies on ecosystem dynamics are largely lacking from the East Antarctic Southern Ocean, although it is well recognized that they are indispensable to identify the ecological impacts and risks of environmental change. Here, we present a framework for establishing a long-term cross-disciplinary study on decadal timescales. We a...
Owing to its extraordinary lifespan and wide geographical distribution along the continental margins of the North Atlantic Ocean, the ocean quahog Arctica islandica may become an important indicator species in environmental change research. To test for applicability and ''calibrate'' the Arctica-indicator, metabolic properties of A. islandica speci...
Data on marine biota exist in many formats and sources, such as published literature, data repositories, and unpublished material. Due to this heterogeneity, information is difficult to find, access and combine, severely impeding its reuse for further scientific analysis and its long-term availability for future generations. To address this challen...
The world's oceans are exposed to a variety of pressures, such as overfishing and the environmental effects of increasingly dense coastal populations. Policy and science agree that a global network of marine protected areas (MPAs) will mitigate these effects. Conservation planners face the dual challenge of planning an MPA based on complex scientif...
Systematic long-term studies on ecosystem dynamics are largely lacking for the East Antarctic Southern Ocean, although it is well recognized that such investigations are indispensable to identify the ecological impacts and risks of environmental change. Therefore, here we develop a framework for establishing a long-term cross-disciplinary study and...
Sea ice is the major constraint on human activities in the Southern Ocean. Depending on a vessel's ice class, human mobility may be restricted or even prevented altogether by sea-ice conditions. This may imply limited access to research or monitoring stations, preferred fishing grounds or attractive tourist sites. Here, we introduce a statistical m...
The Collector's App is a platform-independent (macOS, Linux and Windows) software written in Python. The Collector's App allows biological data to be quality-checked and stored in CRITTERBASE, which is a science-driven PostgreSQL data warehouse for marine biota. For further data processing and statistical analyses or modelling purposes, the respect...
At the end of their operational life offshore wind farms need to be decommissioned. Up to date only few offshore wind farms were decommissioned, so there is a lack of experience and knowledge and decommissioning processes are largely unknown. Also, relevant stakeholders that might interfere with the decommissioning project are poorly investigated....
It is important to understand the historical precedents of current situations to be able to anticipate where the current global environmental and climatic change may lead. Geo-historical data provide information beyond the limitations of instrumental data. This study aims to reconstruct components of the palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental histo...
Bivalve sclerochronological records with annually resolved growth bands are applicable proxies in reconstructing features of the hydro-climate system. Here we evaluate the relationship between growth indices of A. islandica, previously collected at approximately 82 m depth in the North Atlantic, and seasonal subsurface temperature at various depths...
The following downloadable R scripts for calculating the repeated accessibility are available here:
### # https://zenodo.org/record/4714531 # ###
(1) "Download of daily sea ice raster" - The R script automatically downloads all GeoTiffs from IUP, University of Bremen, and saves them in the directory of your choice.
(2) "Existing and missing data"...
Currently, almost 8% of the world’s oceans are designated marine protected areas (MPAs), the majority of which
are relatively small and under national jurisdiction. Several initiatives are presently underway in international
waters to establish large-scale MPAs, such as for the Southern Ocean under the Commission for the Conservation
of Antarctic M...
The functioning of ecosystems is decisively dependent on the composition and distribution of the functional traits of the constituent species. We used trait analysis to represent aspects of marine benthic functioning, using a 20-year time-series (1992–2011) on macrozoobenthos collected annually at four monitoring sites in the southern North Sea. Te...
Amiantis purpurata is a common warm-temperate water bivalve species distributed from southern Brazil to northern Patagonia, Argentina, which has a rich and well preserved fossil record in the San Matías Gulf (SMG) dating back to the late Quaternary. This study aims to establish A. purpurata shells as a new palaeoarchive of past marine conditions in...
The recent identification of the bio-duck call as Antarctic minke whale (AMW) vocalization allows the use of passive acoustic monitoring to retrospectively investigate year-round spatial-temporal patterns in minke whale occurrence in ice-covered areas. Here, we present an analysis of AMW occurrence patterns based on a 9-year passive acoustic datase...
The Southern Ocean may contribute a considerable amount to the proposed global network of marine protected areas (MPAs) that should cover about 10 % of the world's oceans in 2020. In the Antarctic, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is responsible for this task, and currently Germany leads a correspond...
Seit den 1990er-Jahren hat sich die Anzahl an Meeresschutzgebieten um das 1,5 fache erhöht und die geschützte Fläche beträgt weltweit derzeit fast 30 Millionen Quadratkilometer. Das entspricht zwar rund 8 Prozent der Ozeanfläche, verschleiert jedoch die Tatsache, dass sehr viele Schutzgebiete relativ klein sind. Der Antarktische Ozean bietet nun di...
We examined whether taxonomically distinct benthic communities from contrasting sediments in the German Bight (southern North Sea) also differ in their trophic structure. As a case study, we compared the Amphiura filiformis-community (AFC) of silty sands and the Bathyporeia-Tellina-community (BTC) of fine sands using a combination of stable isotope...
The Southern Ocean may contribute a considerable part to the proposed global network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that should cover about 10 % of the world oceans in 2020. In the Antarctic, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is responsible for this task, and currently Germany leads a corresponding...
This study investigated to what extent the extrapallial fluid (EPF) of the marine bivalve Arctica islandica (Linneaus, 1767) is involved in shell formation. With in situ pH microscopy, pH gradients were identified between inner shell surface and outer mantle epithelium (OME). pH at the OMEvaried rapidly between neutral and values above 9, suggestin...
Here we provide four ArcGIS map packages with georeferenced files on the spatial distribution of Antarctic petrels, Adélie penguins (breeders and non-breeders) and Emperor penguins in the wider Weddell Sea (Antarctica), which were created in the context of the development of a marine protected area in the Weddell Sea. Antarctic petrel (Thalassoica...
Here we provide two ArcGIS map packages with georeferenced files on the spatial distribution of seals in the wider Weddell Sea (Antarctica), which were created in the context of the development of a marine protected area in the Weddell Sea. Spatial distribution of seals based on aerial surveys: The map of the spatial distribution of crabeater seals...
Here, we provided four ArcGIS map packages with georeferenced files on the spatial distribution of Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, (adults and larvae) and ice krill, Euphausia crystallorophias, in the wider Weddell Sea. The files were created in the context of the development of a marine protected area in the Weddell Sea.
Here we provide four ArcGIS map packages with georeferenced files on the spatial distribution of demersal and pelagic fishes in the wider Weddell Sea (Antarctica), which were created in the context of the development of a marine protected area (MPA) in the Weddell Sea.
Antarctic toothfish: The map of Dissostichus mawsoni occurrence probability is b...
Here we provide two ArcGIS map packages with georeferenced files on the spatial distribution of sponges and echinoderms in the wider Weddell Sea (Antarctica), which were created in the context of the development of a marine protected area (MPA) in the Weddell Sea.
Secondary production, the growth of new heterotrophic biomass, is a key process in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems that has been carefully measured in many flowing water ecosystems. We combine structural equation modeling with the first worldwide dataset on annual secondary production of stream invertebrate communities to reveal core pathways li...
Macrofaunal sediment reworking activity is a key driver of ecosystem functioning in marine systems. So far sediment reworking rates can only accurately be assessed by measurements as inference from community parameters is limited. In this case study we test the applicability of 2-D optical florescent sediment profile imaging (f-SPI) on multi corer...
Owing to its extremely long life span and occurrence in the entire North Atlantic, the Arctic boreal Arctica islandica has become of particular significance for monitoring the environment, because information on past environmental conditions is archived in morphological and biogeochemical properties of the calcareous shell. To evaluate whether such...
The shallow sandy marine subtidal ecosystem off Mar del Plata, Argentina, is the scene of multiple fisheries activities, in particular the prawn–shrimp Artemesia longinaris and Pleoticus muelleri grounds. We examined the δ ¹³ C vs δ ¹⁵ N isotope signatures of 22 species commonly found in the area in order to understand how this ecosystem supports t...
In this piece, we wanted to highlight the limitations associated with classification techniques that are based on Boolean logic (i.e., true/false) and that impose discrete boundaries to systems. We proposed to shift practices toward techniques that learn from the system under study by adopting soft classification to support uncertainty evaluation a...
The shells of several mollusks can provide environmental and climatic information on a seasonal scale. This variability is recorded within the stable oxygen isotope (δ18Oshell) composition of the biogenic shell carbonate. The δ18Oshell values depend on the composition of the sea water (δ18Owater) and changes in water temperature. The bivalve Amiant...
Arctic marine biota are affected profoundly and at large scales by accelerating environmental change, such as sea-ice decline. Moreover, increasing human activities, e.g. exploitation of natural resources, add further cumulative pressures. Substantial shifts in ecosystem functions and services, e.g. biodiversity, are expected. To understand, predic...
The CAMLR Scientific Committee in 2017 reviewed the scientific background document SC-CAMLR- XXXVI/BG/28. Germany was asked to carry out further work, in particular as regards the issues and questions raised at WG-EMM-17 and SC-CAMLR-XXXVI with respect to the WSMPA proposal (SC-CAMLR-XXXVI, Annex 6, §§ 5.1-5.14).
Chapter 1 reflects on the recommend...
The ocean quahog Arctica islandica is equally attractive to physiologists and environmental scientists due to its long life span of up to 400 years. For physiology, A. islandica is an exciting age model whereas environmental sciences infer past environmental conditions from morphometric and biogeochemical properties of the calcareous shell. In orde...
Sea ice is a major constraint of fishery performance in the Southern Ocean seasonal sea ice zone. We use sea ice concentration data from 2002-2017 that cover the wider Weddell Sea to establish statistical models of (i) accessibility, i.e. the probability that a particular area is navigable by fishery vessels at a given time, and of (ii) repeated ac...
Trawling is one of the most damaging activities for fauna living at the ocean resulting in simultaneous pulse and chronic impacts on benthic communities on multiple spatio-temporal scales. Recently, high quality Vessel Monitoring by Satellite (VMS) data provides spatio-temporal information of swept area by fishery trawlers. Using this huge amount o...
Trawling is one of the most damaging activities for fauna living at the ocean resulting in simultaneous pulse and chronic impacts on benthic communities on multiple spatio-temporal scales. Recently, high quality Vessel Monitoring by Satellite (VMS) data provides spatio-temporal information of swept area by fishery trawlers. Using this huge amount o...
The benthic compartment is central to ecosystem services in shelf seas. Assemblages with a higher diversity have been suggested to operate more effectively. However, there is no general ecological relationship between diversity and ecosystem functioning due to species-specific effects and environmental influences. We are taking a trait-based and la...
The benthic compartment is central to ecosystem services in shelf seas. Assemblages with a higher diversity have been suggested to operate more effectively. However, there is no general ecological relationship between diversity and ecosystem functioning due to species-specific effects and environmental influences. We are taking a trait-based and la...
Arctic marine biota areaffected profoundly and at large scales by accelerating environmental change, such as ocean warming and sea-ice decline. Moreover, increasing human activities add further cumulative pressures. Substantial shifts in ecosystem functions and services,including biodiversity, are expected. Tounderstand, predict, and mitigate the p...
Arctic marine biota areaffected profoundly and at large scales by accelerating environmental change, such as ocean warming and sea-ice decline. Moreover, increasing human activities add further cumulative pressures. Substantial shifts in ecosystem functions and services,including biodiversity, are expected. Tounderstand, predict, and mitigate the p...
Poster presented at the International Polar conference, Rostock, Germany
The concept of the marine ecological community has recently experienced renewed attention, mainly owing to a shift in conservation policies from targeting single and specific objec- tives (e.g. species) towards more integrated approaches. Despite the value of communities as dis- tinct entities, e.g. for conservation purposes, there is still an ongo...
Freshwater bivalves of the order Unionoida display an uncommon phenotypic plasticity with high inter and intra-population morphological variability, which could be advantageous for coping with habitat modifications. However, unionoids have suffered a marked population decline in different parts of the world in the last decades. A decline in some po...
Fjord and channels marine ecosystems of the Magellan region are facing an increasing anthropogenic pressure (salmon aquaculture and hydroelectric industries), which may has effects on natural ecological processes and biogeochemistry cycles. Besides that, physical stressors such as strong storms, freshwater discharge and sea currents alter benthic c...
Biotic interactions are particularly relevant in stable environments, such as the High Antarctic areas. Among them, predation has a key role in structuring community and population variables, including size-frequency distribution. This study aims to quantify the impact of predation by the notothenioid fish Trematomus bernacchii on the Antarctic sca...
Understanding past seasonal temperature variability in the ocean is essential to evaluate the effects of future climate change on marine ecosystems. Here, we estimate seasonal water temperature amplitudes from stable oxygen isotope (δ¹⁸Oshell) values of fossil shells of Arctica islandica (assuming δ¹⁸Owater = + 0.9 ± 0.1‰ V-SMOW). Specimens were co...