Developing a novel system to monitor the status of coastal ecosystems in South West England: from remote sensing to marine predators

This PhD Project aims at developing a reliable and robust monitoring system that will provide comprehensive information about the status of the coastal marine ecosystem off Southwest England, combining bottom-up and top-down approaches and consequently providing a better approximation to mid-trophic level species of economic importance. The project directly addresses the sustainable management of resources, particularly pelagic and demersal fisheries, as it will provide evidence from a combination of sources (remote sensing and top predators) that will identify stressors that can impact the trophic fluxes across the coastal marine ecosystem, where anthropogenic extractive activities have a larger impact. We anticipate that our project will render effective tools that will support monitoring activities and will help detect regional anomalies that have an impact on managed resources (e.g., shifts in the primary productivity regimes, changes in the community composition of primary producers, Harmful Algal Blooms (HAB) events, and losses and changes in the magnitude of trophic links in the food web, among others). Ultimately, this project will increase the amount of ecological-relevant information that we can obtain from readily available samples that can easily be obtained at low costs, positively impacting our ability to identify ecosystem-wide variations, enhancing our capacity to respond to these, and improving our sustainable management strategies.