Monitoring temperature and biodiversity in rocky shores across the whole Atlantic Ocean

FERNANDO LIMA; CATIA MONTEIRO; JOANA PEREIRA; RITA DA SILVA; ROCIO NIETO VIELA; RUI SEABRA

North Devon

Simposio; Fourth International Symposium Advances in Marine Mussel Research; 2022

Coastal areas are among the most thermally dynamic environments onEarth. It is now clear that global warming is impacting these ecosystems notonly through the unabated rise of average temperature, but also through anincrease in variability and stochasticity (e.g. marine heatwaves). Recentstudies have also highlighted the pivotal role played by spatial and temporalvariability in shaping local temperatures, and how this variability can provide(or deprive) organisms with important climate change refugia. However, theextent to which these concepts matter for biodiversity at continental anddecadal scales remains largely unaddressed because of a lack ofsimultaneously detailed and wide coastal temperature and biodiversitydatasets. In this talk we will present a new large-scale project that iscollecting high resolution data on coastal temperatures and on theabundance of conspicuous key coastal macro-species. We employstandardized, simplified and technology-aided biodiversity surveyingprocedures together with state-of-the-art autonomous temperature loggers.Field sites encompass virtually all coastal climates present in the Atlantic,from Svalbard to the Antarctic, along the E and W coasts, and most oceanicislands. All sites are directly comparable, allowing for the analysis of evensubtle patterns with an unprecedented level of confidence and acrossmultiple scales. We will investigate how temperature shapes species’distributions, and how thermal refugia contribute to the presence ofbiodiversity hotspots across a variety of spatial scales and in the context of achanging climate.