SEApHOREST - ROLE OF SEA FORESTS IN SHAPING THE RESPONSE OF COASTAL CALCIFYING ORGANISMS TO PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE GLOBAL CHANGE

This project is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Individual Fellowship awarded to Dr. Aurora M Ricart and funded by the MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR (PCI2021-122040-2B).

The global threat of ocean acidification (OA) has urged interest into whether seagrass ecosystems can increase marine organisms’ resilience by increasing seawater pH through photosynthetic uptake of CO2. However, the complexity and high dynamism of marine chemistry in coastal seawater, and the scarcity of comprehensive studies, have created uncertainty regarding the generality of potential seagrass-pH benefits. It still remains unknown whether seagrasses effectively buffer OA and enhance resilience through environmental stress mitigation or through increased organism’s physiological tolerance. Thus, the role of seagrass ecosystems as climate change refugia or areas that enhance species' adaptive capacity is largely unresolved. SEApHOREST takes an interdisciplinary approach to address this issue by deepening in the study of the seagrass seawater carbonate system and its interaction with calcifying organisms. First, it characterizes the regimes and drivers of environmental variability (i.e. pH and associated carbonate chemistry parameters) in seagrass meadows across locations, depths, and seasons. Second, it uses the paleoecological record to reconstruct pH variability and to assess its effects on organisms' calcification in seagrass meadows in the past. Third, it assesses the effects of different environmental variability regimes in seagrass meadows over organisms' calcification in present and future scenarios of climate change, respectively. Finally, it tests whether parental acclimatization to different environmental variability regimes in seagrass meadows translates in better OA tolerance to the offspring through transgenerational plasticity.