摘要：Shallow waters and lowland meet at the same level in the Wadden Sea, but are separated by walls of coastal defense. What are the prospects of this coastal ecosystem in a warmer world? We focus on tidal waters and inshore sedimentary bottoms, expect nutrient supply from land to decline and species introductions, temperature and sea level to rise. The effects are interrelated and will have an increasing likelihood of abrupt and irreversible developments. The biotic interactions are hardly predictable but we anticipate the following changes to be more likely than others: blooms of phytoplankton will be weak mainly because of increasing pelagic and benthic grazing pressure, both facilitated by warming. Possibly birds feeding on mollusks will encounter decreasing resource availability while fish-eaters benefit. Extensive reefs of Pacific oysters could facilitate aquatic macrophytes. Sea level rise and concomitant hydrodynamics above tidal flats favor well-anchored suspension feeders as well as burrowing fauna adapted to dynamic permeable sand. With high shares of immigrants from overseas and the south, species richness will increase; yet the ecosystem stability may become lower. We suggest that for the next decades invasions of introduced species followed by warming and declining nutrient supply will be the most pressing factor on the changes in the Wadden Sea ecosystem, and the effects of sea level rise to be the key issue on the scale of the whole century and beyond.
