About the project:

DWARF is an Polish-Norwegian project which aims to provide a basic understanding of the effects of the global warming on the size of the Arctic organisms of terrestrial, limnetic and marine ecosystems. The project will generate new data about the effects of changed thermal regimes on the size of biological units at the level of genome, cell and individual organism as well as size structures of populations and communities. The special attention will be paid to Arctic species and communities as climate change effects are most likely to be first perceived in polar systems. The shift in size distributions in communities can have serious impacts on these ecosystems’ functioning as it will affect the biological productivity and flow of energy and matter in the food-webs. The synthesis of the data generated within the scope of this project will provide a comprehensive view of the effects of the climate change on the size, and the related consequences in functioning of terrestrial, limnetic and marine ecosystems in the Arctic.

key facts:
Project acronym: DWARF
Project full title: Declining size - a general response to climate warming in Arctic fauna?
Call: Core 2012 Call of the Polish-Norwegian Research Programme implemented under the Norwegian Financial Mechanism
Area: Climate change including polar research
Programme operator: The National Center for Research and Development
Contract number: Pol-Nor/201992/93/2014
Project duration: 36 months (February 2014-January 2017)
Project budget: 3 956 989 PLN
Project Promoter: Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences (IO PAN)
Project Partners: Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), Tromsǿ
University of Oslo (UiO)
Akvaplan-niva (APN), Tromsǿ

contact:
Project Promotor institution:
Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences ul. Powstańców Warszawy 55
81-712 Sopot
Poland
Project coordinator:
dr Maria Włodarska-Kowalczuk
tel: + 4858 7311778
email: maria@iopan.gda.pl