Based on: Mourato, C. V., Padrão, N., Serrão, E. A., & Paulo, D. (2023). Less Is More: Seagrass Restoration Success Using Less Vegetation per Area. Sustainability, 15(17), 12937. Efforts to restore seagrass meadows have been increasing, however strong currents and frequent storms often disturb newly transplanted seagrasses, making restoration efforts difficult and costly. But researchers...
Black corals create extensive animal forests in the Canary Islands, providing habitat, food and shelter for a myriad of organisms. These keystone habitats are intricately linked to flow intensity, shaping the presence, morphology and distribution of these suspension feeders. In this sense, black corals are sessile organisms which feed mainly on microscopic particles within the water column,...
The Phytophthora Research Centre team based at Mendel University in Brno has a long history of uncovering Oomycete diversity on terrestrial forest ecosystems all over the world… and now, within the RestoreSeas project, we are taking this challenge to another environment: hunting Oomycetes in marine forests! Understanding the impact of these pathogens in marine ecosystems is of crucial importance...
Based on: Gouveia, A., Godefroid, M., Dubois, P., Espino, F., Tuya, F., Haroun, R., Herrera, A. and Otero-Ferrer, F., 2023. Thermal stress response of Antipathella wollastoni (Gray, 1857) from the Canary Islands archipelago. Coral Reefs, pp.1-7. In the cool, shadowy depths of Macaronesian waters, the black coral Antipathella wollastoni faces a crucial test—the rising temperatures of the ocean....
Based on: Tavares, A.I., Assis, J., Larkin, P.D., Creed, J.C., Magalhães, K., Horta, P., Engelen, A., Cardoso, N., Barbosa, C., Pontes, S. and Regalla, A., 2023. Long range gene flow beyond predictions from oceanographic transport in a tropical marine foundation species. Scientific Reports, 13(1), p.9112. Habitat-forming marine species, like seagrasses, corals and macroalgae have wide...
All organisms leave a trace of DNA in the environment that they inhabit, including those living in the ocean. We call this type of DNA, environmental DNA (eDNA). Example sources of eDNA include, but are not limited to, faeces, mucus, gametes, shed skin and dead cells. We can sample this DNA and analyse it to figure out who was there! In our case, we will use eDNA to study the biodiversity in...