BIOINTERACT
With the imminent climatic and biodiversity crises, it is crucial to understand the mechanistic links between climate and biodiversity. BIOINTERACT will take a technologically and quantitatively-driven approach to understand how foundation species alter their surrounding environment, buffering the effects of climate change and contributing to the resilience of the whole community, particularly by mediating the strength of biotic interactions. BIOINTERACT will focus on the structuring effects of canopy-forming macroalgae over intertidal communities from microhabitat to macroecological scales.
The importance of rocky shore brown macroalgae communities as environmental modifiers, as providers of refugia from climate change, and as modifiers of biotic interactions will be assessed with unprecedented detail. We will quantify the thermal amelioration, wave attenuation, and shading generated by canopies and compare them to the conditions offered by turf algae or bare rock. We will then quantify the role of canopy-forming species as providers of habitat and food. Both the microclimates created by canopies and the structure of communities they sustain will be assessed along large-scale thermal gradients allowing us to predict how ongoing warming will affect biodiversity and ecosystem functioning of marine forests. The results from this work will markedly expand current knowledge on how two-way biotic interactions influence the sheltering role of macroalgae and allow for a much more accurate parametrization of species distribution models estimating future coastal biodiversity scenarios under changing climatic conditions. As we will be exploring fundamental processes driving biogeographic change, conclusions drawn here will be relevant to other ecosystems such as coral reefs, seagrass beds, or mangroves, as well as contribute to marine conservation planning.
Team
Principal Investigator
Researchers
Students

Luís Filipe Ferreira Pereira
Position: PhD Student
Group:
COASTALWARMING Technical Staff
State
Ongoing
Proponent Institution
Associação BIOPOLIS (CIBIO-InBIO)
Funded by
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
Dates
2023 (Duration: 3 years)
Participant Institutions
Roscoff Biological Station, University of Bremen
Reference
2022.02887.PTDC