Unerstanding and predicting the Resilience of marine ecosystems

The impacts of climate change are now more pervasive than ever before in human history.

Marine ecosystems have been particularly impacted by climate change, with several of them being at the brink of collapse. As a response, the international efforts to reduce carbon emissions have never been so ambitious.

However, even in the most optimistic CO2 emission scenarios, the planet will continue to warm and experience the effects of climate change over the coming decades.

For this reason, several international conservation targets have been set to maintain the resilience of marine ecosystems to climate change.

Despite these calls, resilience research has been hampered by a lack of coherent ways to quantify it and the limited availability of empirical data.ROMANCE overcomes these limitations by taking an interdisciplinary approach to understand and predict the resilience of threatened Mediterranean marine ecosystems to current and future climate change.

More specifically, in ROMANCE I will (1) study the resilience of marine communities to past marine heatwaves, (2) develop a deep algorithm to detect early warning signals of collapse and (3) use cutting-edge to predict the resilience of marine communities to different climate change disturbances.

The results arising from ROMANCE will provide relevant information for the application of EU directives, especially related to climate change adaptation and coastal resilience, as well as a great leap for the applicant’s career, with valuable training and high-level publications expected.