LIFECO: LInking hydrographic Frontal activity to ECOsystem dynamics in the North Sea and Skagerrak: Importance to Fish Stock recruitment

LIFECO takes a holistic approach to the understanding of a key element
of the North Sea ecosystem: resolving the importance of frontal
regions, a key organising processing the marine environment, for
recruitment success of important North Sea fish stocks.

The influence of intra- and inter-annual climatic forcing on bottom up
processes will be resolved, by developing and implementing a nested
small-scale physical/biological model incorporating organism behaviour
and nutrient fluxes to simulate phytoplankton and zooplankton
production and aggregation relative to frontal processes. This work
will allow the horizontal and vertical distribution of potential prey
items for larval and juvenile fish to be simulated, as well as the
inter- and intra-annual variability of these items relative to frontal
processes. Simulated fields developed by the model will then be
validated with state-of-the-art field and remote sensing techniques.

The second key mechanism influencing recruitment success of fish
stocks in the North Sea are 'top down' or predation
processes. Aggregations of planktivorous and piscivorous fish species
in frontal environments are common occurrences in the marine
environment. A key objective in this programme is to resolve the
impact of predation on the abundance of zooplankton as well as larval
and early juvenile fish by planktivorous and piscivorous predators in
frontal regions relative to stratified non-frontal regimes. Estimates
of consumption rates and predatory impact will be obtained on basis of
a multi-disciplinary field programme covering different hydrographic
regimes via the analysis of stomach contents and the utilization of
food web biomarkers. Estimates of mortality rates will then be
developed based on the observed distributions and abundance of
different species relative to water column characteristics during
cruise programmes.

The ecosystem approach required to address the primary goals of the
programme necessitates the utilization and integration of a
multi-disciplinary research strategy. Hence, the programme has been
divided into 9 workpackages:

1) Advancement of hydrodynamic models: Resolution of frontal
variability and key forcing processes.

2) Coupled Bio-modelling: Simulation of lower trophic level dynamics

3) Remote Sensing of Frontal Regimes

4) Distribution and abundance of plankton and fish relative frontal processes.

5) Effects of frontal processes in the plankton: resource controls and
trophic interactions

6) Predatory interaction between fish species and top-down control of
zooplankton relative to frontal processes.

7) Database assembly

8) GIS and Spatial Data Analysis

9) Synthesis, scenario and hypothesis testing