engleski

Enhancing the effectiveness of restoration actions in coralligenous habitats: insights from a transregional thermotolerance experiment

Understanding the response of organisms facing climate change is critical to buffer the on- going biodiversity crisis. The Mediterranean coralligenous habitats are among the richest but also most threatened habitats of the Mediterranean. Indeed, coralligenous habitats, dominated by long-lived and structural species such as octocorals or sponges, have been impacted by different marine heat waves causing large-scale mortality events. Considering the slow dynamics of many impacted species, mortality events question the future of coralligenous habitats and restoration actions appeared as one of the most relevant tools to buffer biodiversity losses. Effective restoration actions should rely on an understanding of the interactions among the organisms to be restored and their local environment in order to allow the identification of relevant donor populations to restore vulnerable and degraded populations. The main aim of the present study was to characterize the interactions between Paramuricea clavata, a habitat-forming octocoral severely but differentially impacted by mortality events, and its thermal environment. We carried out a common garden experiment in aquaria focusing on the response to thermal stress of 12 populations from five different regions (Catalunya, Corsica, Northern Italy, Croatia and Southern Portugal) within the North Western Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Atlantic. The objectives of this study were: 1) to further the acquisition of basic information about the thermotolerance features of P. clavata ; 2) to evaluate the role of biological processes in the differential responses to thermal stress by conducting genomic analyses ; 3) to characterize the micro-eukaryotic and prokaryotic communities associated to the targeted populations. Here, we will present the first results of this study. We will discuss their implications for restoration actions of the coralligenous habitats dominated by P. clavata in the context of on-going climate change.

Climate change ; mass mortality events ; common garden experiment ; local adaptation ; microbiome

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