Publications by authors named "Mario Minguito-Frutos"
Article Synopsis
- Extreme storms like Storm Gloria can cause significant and lasting damage to seagrass ecosystems, particularly affecting foundational species like Posidonia oceanica.
- Following Storm Gloria in January 2020, surveys of seagrass meadows revealed that over half experienced shoot unburial, with some areas having up to 40 cm of sediment removed, while burial affected 10-80% of meadows.
- The research highlights that more exposed and patchy meadows are more susceptible to such extreme weather events, and it may take decades to centuries for these damaged seagrass ecosystems to recover, emphasizing the need for their protection against human impact.
Introduction: Light gradients are ubiquitous in marine systems as light reduces exponentially with depth. Seagrasses have a set of mechanisms that help them to cope with light stress gradients. Physiological photoacclimation and clonal integration help to maximize light capture and minimize carbon losses.
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- Abiotic factors, such as temperature and nutrients, significantly shape plant-herbivore interactions, impacting the stability of ecosystems like marine forests.
- Overgrazing, particularly by sea urchins, has led to the spread of barren areas on rocky reefs, which function differently than vegetated habitats and require new understandings to reverse these trends.
- Research found that limpets thrive in barren areas created by urchin overgrazing, with their grazing effects varying by nutrient levels, thus indicating that low-nutrient conditions heighten the vulnerability of these ecosystems in the Mediterranean.
Changes in light and sediment conditions can sometimes trigger abrupt regime shifts in seagrass meadows resulting in dramatic and unexpected die-offs of seagrass. Light attenuates rapidly with depth, and in seagrass systems with non-linear behaviours, can serve as a sharp boundary beyond which the meadow transitions to bare sand. Determining system behaviour is therefore essential to ensuring resilience is maintained and to prevent stubborn critical ecosystem transitions caused by declines in water quality.
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