Possible climate impacts on the northern Adriatic pelagic ecosystem

Nowadays one of the most challenging questions all over the world for both terrestrial and marine ecologists is: how climate changes will impact a given ecosystem? To forecast the possible responses we need to know how that system behaved in the past under climatic oscillations, which means that we have to look at long time series of data. For the marine scientists the major problem is that our biological time series are generally rather short (usually no more than 50 years) compared to terrestrial or atmospheric records. Thanks to paleocologists we are able to reconstruct the far past, but this does not help us to understand the biological characteristics of 100 - 150 years ago. They are a sort of black box. In this paper we present different long time series data collected in the northern Adriatic Sea.