• Energy Research
• 14. Life underwater close
• DE close
• EU close

The MUSES project is a 2 year Horizon 2020 funded project under Grant Agreement No. 727451. The MUSES project builds on existing knowledge to explore the real opportunities for Multi-Use (“MU”) in Europe, including the scope for innovation and Blue Growth potential and to present practical solutions on how to overcome existing barriers and minimise risks associated with MU development. The MUSES project encompasses five EU sea basins (Baltic Sea, North Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea and Eastern Atlantic). The purpose of this document is to provide a half term summary of the work undertaken for the Multi-Use in European Seas (“MUSES”) Project during the first year (1st November 2016 – 31st October 2017).

Overexploitation is recognized as one of the main threats to global biodiversity. Here, we report a widespread change in the functional diversity of fisheries catches from the large marine ecosystems (LMEs) of the world over the past 65 years (1950 to 2014). The spatial and temporal trends of functional diversity exploited from the LMEs were calculated using global reconstructed marine fisheries catch data provided by the Sea Around Us initiative (including subsistence, artisanal, recreational, industrial fisheries, and discards) and functional trait data available in FishBase. Our analyses uncovered a substantial increase in the functional richness of both ray-finned fishes (80% of LMEs) and cartilaginous species (sharks and rays) (75% of LMESs), in line with an increase in the taxonomic richness, extracted from these ecosystems. The functional evenness and functional divergence of these catches have also altered substantially over the time span of this study, with considerable geographic variation in the patterns detected. These trends show that global fisheries are increasingly targeting species that play diverse roles within the marine ecosystem and underline the importance of incorporating functional diversity in ecosystem management.

Coastal systems are increasingly threatened by multiple local anthropogenic and global climatic stressors. With the difficulties in remediating global stressors, management requires alternative approaches that focus on local scales. We used manipulative experiments to test whether reducing local stressors (sediment load and nutrient concentrations) can improve the resilience of foundation species (canopy algae along temperate rocky coastlines) to future projected global climate stressors (high wave exposure, increasing sea surface temperature), which are less amenable to management actions. We focused on Fucoids (Cystoseira barbata) along the north-western Adriatic coast in the Mediterranean Sea because of their ecological relevance, sensitivity to a variety of human impacts, and declared conservation priority. At current levels of sediment and nutrients, C. barbata showed negative responses to the simulated future scenarios of high wave exposure and increased sea surface temperature. However, reducing the sediment load increased the survival of C. barbata recruits by 90.24% at high wave exposure while reducing nutrient concentrations resulted in a 20.14% increase in the survival and enhanced the growth of recruited juveniles at high temperature. We conclude that improving water quality by reducing nutrient concentrations, and particularly the sediment load, would significantly increase the resilience of C. barbata populations to projected increases in climate stressors. Developing and applying appropriate targets for specific local anthropogenic stressors could be an effective management action to halt the severe and ongoing loss of key marine habitats.

In this study, we assessed the effect of environmental salinity and pH as independent factors on larval survival of Atlantic bluefin tuna (ABFT –Thunnus thynnus) together with their whole-body Na+/K+-ATPase and v-type H+-ATPase activities. Fertilized eggs of ABFT were obtained from a spontaneous spawning of broodstock in the farming facilities at El Gorguel (Cartagena, SE Spain) and were transferred to facilities of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) in Mazarrón (SE Spain). In a first experiment, eggs (200 fertilized eggs L−1 per treatment, in 3 replicates) were exposed to different salinities treatments and constant pH 8.0 (control) until hatch was completed (50 h post-fertilization, hpf, at 23 °C): 27, 30, 33, 36, 37, 38 (control), 39, 40, 43, 46 and 49 ppt. In a second experiment eggs (200 fertilized eggs L−1, in 3 replicates) were exposed to seawater salinity (SW: 38 ppt) and four reduced pH treatments until hatch was completed (50 hpf at 23 °C): 8.0 (control), 7.7, 7.5 and 7.3. An inverse “U-shaped” relationship was observed between environmental salinity and number of hatched larvae. An opposite pattern was observed for both Na+/K+-ATPase and H+-ATPase activities in hatched larvae, increasing both activities in groups exposed to extreme salinities. Thus, larval survival was higher at intermediate salinities and lower at the extreme salinities tested. These results suggest higher survival rates with lower active pumps activities. No significant differences in larval survival were observed with pH treatment, but lower H+-ATPase activity was detected at control environmental pH (pH 8.0). Survival results are discussed in terms of osmoregulatory cost adapting to a salinity and pH predicted for the near future scenarios. 2,041

A stochastic age-structured population model was developed to explore biologically favourable levels of effort and closing periods within the sardine pelagic fishery in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Results suggested that the developed age-structured model captured the observed biomass fluctuations and catches reasonably well and represents the first comprehensive investigation of alternative management strategies for eastern Mediterranean sardine fishery that include stochasticity. The present study provided direct evidence for the importance of the correct timing of the temporal fishing ban. Significant benefits were found both in terms of biomass and catch from a corrective shift in the fishing closed period. The current findings suggested that protecting the younger age groups from fishing in the period October-December, by shifting the ban period earlier than December may profit, biologically, the stock and economically the fishing sector. Progressive reductions in fishing mortality/effort also yield significant positive biological and fishery benefits in the short term.

AbstractMarine plankton play a crucial role in carbon storage, global climate, and ecosystem function. Planktonic ecosystems are embedded in patches of water that are continuously moving, stretching, and diluting. These processes drive inhomegeneities on a range of scales, with implications for the integrated ecosystem properties, but are hard to characterize. We present a theoretical framework that accounts for all these aspects; tracking the water patch hosting a drifting ecosystem along with its physical, environmental, and biochemical features. The theory resolves patch dilution and internal physical mixing as a function of oceanic strain and diffusion. Ecological dynamics are parameterized by an idealized nutrient and phytoplankton population and we specifically capture the time evolution of the biochemical spatial variances to represent within-patch heterogeneity. We find that, depending only on the physical processes to which the water patch is subjected, the plankton biomass response to a resource perturbation can vary in size up to six times. This work indicates that we must account for these processes when interpreting and modeling marine ecosystems and provides a framework with which to do so.