Marine macrophytes in a changing world: mechanisms underpinning responses and resilience to environmental stress – an introduction to a Virtual Issue

Smale, DA and King, NG 2024 Marine macrophytes in a changing world: mechanisms underpinning responses and resilience to environmental stress – an introduction to a Virtual Issue. New Phytologist, 244 (5). https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.20215

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Abstract/Summary

Marine macrophytes, such as seagrasses and macroalgae, are widely distributed across the world's coastlines, where they function as foundation organisms in nearshore ecosystems by providing habitat, food and shelter for a wide diversity of organisms and altering local environmental conditions (Fig. 1). The coastal habitats they create have massive ecological and socioeconomic benefits, underpinning ecosystem services worth trillions of dollars annually and supporting billions of people world-wide through the provision of food and resources, protection of coastlines, regulation of climate and recycling of nutrients. Increasingly, however, marine macrophytes are impacted by a range of anthropogenic stressors (e.g. ocean warming, coastal development, decreased water quality and overfishing), which threaten the persistence and integrity of these habitats and the ecosystem services they underpin. A better understanding of how marine macrophytes are responding to environmental change, and the underlying mechanisms that mediate their resilience to increasing stressors, is needed to inform approaches to their management and conservation. In this regard, several key papers published in New Phytologist over the past decade or so have shed new light on the responses of seagrasses and habitat-forming macroalgae (i.e. kelps and fucoids) to environmental change, and the biological processes underpinning such responses. In this Virtual Issue, we bring together some of these studies to highlight key areas of scientific progress and identify where pressing knowledge gaps still remain. The studies fall within the broad themes of: (1) observed and predicted responses to environmental change; and (2) mechanisms underpinning responses to environmental change across different levels of biological organisation. We also highlight research priorities and conclude with a rallying call for greater research focus on marine macrophyte foundation species, as current knowledge lags way behind that for their terrestrial and aquatic counterparts

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Additional Keywords:	marine macrophyte, ecosystem services, anthropogenic stressors
Subjects:	Ecology and Environment Marine Sciences
Divisions:	Marine Biological Association of the UK > Coastal Ecology
Depositing User:	Ms Kristina Hixon
Date made live:	09 Dec 2024 10:24
Last Modified:	09 Dec 2024 10:24
URI:	https://plymsea.ac.uk/id/eprint/10341

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