Linking Individual Responses to Climate Change to Whole-Ecosystem Dynamics in Marine and Coastal Habitats

From mollusc shells to kelp holdfasts, individual marine organisms are on the front line of a rapidly changing ocean. Warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and intensifying extreme events act first on individuals, reshaping their behaviour, physiology, biomechanics, and the material properties of the structures they build. Yet the consequences rarely stop at the level of the organism. Individual-scale responses propagate through populations and communities to alter the structure and functioning of entire ecosystems, as when mass coral bleaching dismantles the habitat that thousands of reef-associated species depend on. Understanding how change at the smallest biological scales scales up to whole-ecosystem dynamics is one of the central challenges in marine global-change ecology, and a prerequisite for predicting and managing the future of coastal and marine systems.This Research Topic seeks to connect individual-level responses to climate change with their emergent ecosystem-level consequences in marine and coastal habitats. We aim to bring together work that explicitly bridges scales, from the mechanisms by which individual organisms sense, tolerate, and adapt to environmental stress, to the cascading effects of these responses on species interactions, community composition, habitat provision, and ecosystem function. We particularly welcome cross-disciplinary contributions that integrate organismal biology with community and ecosystem ecology, and that combine experimental, observational, and modelling approaches.We welcome original research, reviews, methods, and perspectives addressing, but not limited to:• Behavioural, physiological, and biomechanical responses of marine organisms to climate-driven stressors • Material properties of biological structures (shells, skeletons, holdfasts) and their ecological consequences Scaling individual responses to population, community, and ecosystem dynamics • Foundation and habitat-forming species, climate disturbance, and habitat loss (e.g. coral bleaching, kelp decline) • Eco-physiological mechanisms underlying resilience, acclimation, and adaptation in changing oceans Approaches that link organismal traits to ecosystem function, including trait-based and modelling frameworks Topic editors: Maya deVries, Brittany Jellison, Noelle Marie Lucey Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83010/linking-individual-responses-to-climate-change-to-whole-ecosystem-dynamics-in-marine-and-coastal-habitats