Impacts of climate-driven changes in fish distributions on contaminants exposure and accumulation in marine food webs

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Impacts of climate-driven changes in fish distributions on contaminants exposure and accumulationin marine food websMarine fish play a vital role in marine food webs, including as food to iconic top predators such asmarine mammals and seabirds. They are also exposed to a wide range of contaminants, and mayaccumulate these and transfer them to their predators. This project will investigate how the relativerisk of exposure to contaminants varies between fish species, how this risk will change as fish speciesdistributions track our changing climate and as fish communities are reorganised, and what theimplications of this are for the wider marine food web, ecosystem functions and services. In a novelcollaboration between marine macroecology and ecotoxicology, the project will involve analysis ofexisting big biological and chemical data using a range of computational techniques e.g.meta-analysis, systematic reviews of existing data, modelling, and ecoinformatics. The focus willinitially be on the North Sea, which is characterised by multiple human pressures, including chemicalcontaminants and rapid warming, but which also supplies important ecosystem services, many ofthem mediated through its fish communities. The North Sea is also among the most well-monitoredand data-rich marine ecosystems in the world, and the increasing open availability of biological,chemical, and climate data products produced by national and European initiatives make the big dataapproaches that are central to this project extremely timely.