Algarve Centre for Marine Sciences

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Variability of prey preferences and uptake of anthropogenic particles by juvenile white seabream in a coastal lagoon nursery ground

Publication . Müller, Carolin; Erzini, Karim; Dudeck, Tim; Cruz, Joana; Corona, Luana Santos; Abrunhosa, Felipe; Afonso, Carlos; Mateus, Miguel Ângelo Franco; Orro, Cristina; Monteiro, Pedro; Ekau, Werner

Marine plastic litter, originating from land-based sources, enters the marine environment by passing through coastal ecosystems such as lagoons and estuaries. As early life history stages (ELHS) of many commercially important fish species rely on these transitional areas as nursery grounds, we hypothesized that they encounter a spatial gradient of habitat quality and pollution from inner to outer parts of their vital environment. With sizes < 5 mm, anthropogenic particles (AP), among them microplastic (MP) fibers and fragments, entail a high bioavailability for ELHS of fish, potentially facilitating AP uptake at early developmental stages which may have implications for their survival and growth. This study provides a contextualization baseline between feeding preferences and uptake of AP by the white seabream Diplodus sargus (Linnaeus, 1758) in an estuarine nursery ground on the southern coast of Portugal. Juvenile fish showed a generalized, omnivorous feeding mode with differences in trophic resource utilization between individuals collected at distinct seagrass meadows in the lagoon. A total of 23.13% of the fish (n = 147) were detected with AP in the gastrointestinal tract, and the mean number of AP per AP-feeding individual was 1.64 +/- 1.04, with anthropogenic fibers (n = 47) occurring more frequently than fragments (n = 9). Knowledge of the underlying factors for MP ingestion will be greatly enhanced by considering environmental conditions along with species-stage and life-stage specific feeding modes and prey preferences which shape the uptake probability of anthropogenic fibers and fragments.

2023Journal article

Open Access

Global dataset of soil organic carbon in tidal marshes

Publication . Maxwell, Tania L.; Rovai, André S.; Adame, Maria Fernanda; Adams, Janine B.; Álvarez-Rogel, José; Austin, William E. N.; Beasy, Kim; Boscutti, Francesco; Böttcher, Michael E.; Bouma, Tjeerd J.; Bulmer, Richard H.; Burden, Annette; Burke, Shannon A.; Camacho, Saritta; Chaudhary, Doongar R.; Chmura, Gail L.; Copertino, Margareth; Cott, Grace M.; Craft, Christopher; Day, John; de los Santos, Carmen B.; Denis, Lionel; Ding, Weixin; Ellison, Joanna C.; Ewers Lewis, Carolyn J.; Giani, Luise; Gispert, Maria; Gontharet, Swanne; González-Pérez, José A.; González-Alcaraz, M. Nazaret; Gorham, Connor; Graversen, Anna Elizabeth L.; Grey, Anthony; Guerra, Roberta; He, Qiang; Holmquist, James R.; Jones, Alice R.; Juanes, José A.; Kelleher, Brian P.; Kohfeld, Karen E.; Krause-Jensen, Dorte; Lafratta, Anna; Lavery, Paul S.; Laws, Edward A.; Leiva-Dueñas, Carmen; Loh, Pei Sun; Lovelock, Catherine E.; Lundquist, Carolyn J.; Macreadie, Peter I.; Mazarrasa, Inés; Megonigal, J. Patrick; Neto, Joao M.; Nogueira, Juliana; Osland, Michael J.; Pagès, Jordi F.; Perera, Nipuni; Pfeiffer, Eva-Maria; Pollmann, Thomas; Raw, Jacqueline L.; Recio, María; Ruiz-Fernández, Ana Carolina; Russell, Sophie K.; Rybczyk, John M.; Sammul, Marek; Sanders, Christian; Santos, Rui; Serrano, Oscar; Siewert, Matthias; Smeaton, Craig; Song, Zhaoliang; Trasar-Cepeda, Carmen; Twilley, Robert R.; Van de Broek, Marijn; Vitti, Stefano; Antisari, Livia Vittori; Voltz, Baptiste; Wails, Christy N.; Ward, Raymond D.; Ward, Melissa; Wolfe, Jaxine; Yang, Renmin; Zubrzycki, Sebastian; Landis, Emily; Smart, Lindsey; Spalding, Mark; Worthington, Thomas A.

Tidal marshes store large amounts of organic carbon in their soils. Field data quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks provide an important resource for researchers, natural resource managers, and policy-makers working towards the protection, restoration, and valuation of these ecosystems. We collated a global dataset of tidal marsh soil organic carbon (MarSOC) from 99 studies that includes location, soil depth, site name, dry bulk density, SOC, and/or soil organic matter (SOM). The MarSOC dataset includes 17,454 data points from 2,329 unique locations, and 29 countries. We generated a general transfer function for the conversion of SOM to SOC. Using this data we estimated a median (+/- median absolute deviation) value of 79.2 +/- 38.1 Mg SOC ha-1 in the top 30 cm and 231 +/- 134 Mg SOC ha-1 in the top 1 m of tidal marsh soils globally. This data can serve as a basis for future work, and may contribute to incorporation of tidal marsh ecosystems into climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies and policies.

2023Journal article

Open Access

Forecasting biotoxin contamination in mussels across production areas of the Portuguese coast with Artificial Neural Networks

Publication . Cruz, Rafaela C.; Reis Costa, Pedro; Krippahl, Ludwig; Lopes, Marta B.

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) and the consequent contamination of shellfish are complex processes depending on several biotic and abiotic variables, turning prediction of shellfish contamination into a challenging task. Not only the information of interest is dispersed among multiple sources, but also the complex temporal relationships between the time-series variables require advanced machine methods to model such relationships. In this study, multiple time-series variables measured in Portuguese shellfish production areas were used to forecast shellfish contamination by diarrhetic she-llfish poisoning (DSP) toxins one to four weeks in advance. These time series included DSP con-centration in mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis), toxic phytoplankton cell counts, meteorological, and remotely sensed oceanographic variables. Several data pre-processing and feature engineering methods were tested, as well as multiple autoregressive and artificial neural network (ANN) models. The best results regarding the mean absolute error of prediction were obtained for a bivariate long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network based on biotoxin and toxic phytoplankton measurements, with higher accuracy for short-term forecasting horizons. When evaluating all ANNs model ability to predict the contamination state (below or above the regulatory limit for contamination) and changes to this state, multilayer perceptrons (MLP) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) yielded improved predictive performance on a case-by-case basis. These results show the possibility of extracting relevant information from time-series data from multiple sources which are predictive of DSP contamination in mussels, therefore placing ANNs as good candidate models to assist the production sector in anticipating harvesting interdictions and mitigating economic losses.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

2022-12Journal article

Open Access

Pleistocene hunter-gatherer coastal adaptations in Atlantic Iberia

Publication . Bicho, Nuno; Esteves, Eduardo

Coastal prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Atlantic Iberia were particularly important to understanding Paleolithic human innovation and resilience. This study will focus on Middle and Upper Paleolithic adaptations to the Iberian Atlantic border. Elements such as intensity and diversity of marine foods, site location, distance to shore, submerged platform, and bathymetry are discussed for the region between Gibraltar and the Gulf of Biscay

2022-08-25Journal article

Open Access

A first approach for the micropropagation of the medicinal halophyte Polygonum maritimum L. and phenolic profile of acclimatized plants

Publication . Custódio, Luísa; Slusarczyk, Sylwester; Matkowski, Adam; Castañeda-Loaiza, Viana; Fernandes, Eliana; Pereira, Catarina; Rodrigues, Maria João

Polygonum maritimum L. (sea knotgrass) belongs to a genus commonly used in folk medicine to treat inflammation-related disorders. In vitro pharmacological studies have confirmed these properties that were ascribed to bioactive flavonoids, such as myricetin and quercetin glycosides. Therefore, this study aimed at establishing a micropropagation procedure for sea knotgrass for obtaining standardized materials for its potential commercial cultivation. For that, a complete plant regeneration protocol was developed by improving shoot multiplication from nodal explants, rooting and acclimatization procedures, followed by the assessment of the phenolic profile of the in vitro-produced plants. The combination of 3 mg/L 6-benzylaminopurine (BA) + 0.1 mg/L indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) induced the maximum shoot formation (10.3), which was significantly increased from the first to the second cycle (18.3). The best rooting capacity was observed on shoots derived from the control medium (100%), followed by 2 mg/L kinetin (KIN) (97%) and 3 mg/L BA + 0.1 mg/L IAA (90%); however, the shoot number at the end of the rooting phase was higher on shoots derived from 3 mg/L BA + 0.1 mg/L IAA (6.16). The plant growth regulators used in the multiplication phase influenced survival in the acclimatization process, and plants derived from the control medium had the highest survival percentage (63.1%). Acetone extracts made from aerial organs of micropropagated sea knotgrass showed a predominance of the flavonoid myricetin-3-O-rhamnoside (8.135 mg/g). Overall, the halophyte sea knotgrass was successfully micropropagated showing its potential as a medicinal crop for the extraction of bioactive molecules.

2022Journal article

Open Access