Consistency of aquatic enclosed experiments

Aim: Marine and freshwater ecosystems are increasingly threatened by human activities. For over a century, scientists have been testing many biological, chemical and physical questions to understand various ecosystems and their resilience to different stressors. While the majority of experiments were conducted at small-scale laboratory settings, lately large mesocosm experiments have become more and more common. Yet, it still remains unclear how the scale (i.e. space) and ecological complexity (i.e. community vs. limited number of species) of experiments affect the results and to what extent different experimental types are comparable.

Innovation: Here, we conducted two types of experiments, run at different scale and ecological-complexity levels (i.e. outdoor large-scale community-level mesocosm vs. indoor small-scale two-species laboratory experiment), to assess the effects of marine heatwaves on two gammarid species.

Main Conclusions: Our approach detected differences in abunda...