Conservation of dark habitats

Navarro‐Barranco, Carlos; Ambroso, Stefano; Gerovasileiou, Vasilis; Gómez‐Gras, Daniel; Grinyó, Jordi; Montseny, María; Santín, Andreu

doi:10.1016/b978-0-323-85613-3.00005-0

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 205 publications

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“…Foremost, this is because of the still incomplete knowledge about the spatial distribution, biodiversity, vulnerability and biochemical processes and services of groundwater ecosystems (Gerovasileiou & Bianchi, 2021; Mammola et al., 2022; Wynne et al., 2021). While divers can physically explore submerged caves and cenotes, the vast majority of subterranean water bodies are inaccessible to humans unless by indirect means (Ficetola et al., 2019; Navarro‐Barranco et al., 2023; Saccò, Blyth, Douglas, et al., 2022). Indeed, access to groundwater organisms is often restricted to caves, wells and springs that serve as windows to the subterranean world (Malard et al., 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem

Saccò,

Mammola,

Altermatt

et al. 2023

Global Change Biology

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Groundwater is a vital ecosystem of the global water cycle, hosting unique biodiversity and providing essential services to societies. Despite being the largest unfrozen freshwater resource, in a period of depletion by extraction and pollution, groundwater environments have been repeatedly overlooked in global biodiversity conservation agendas. Disregarding the importance of groundwater as an ecosystem ignores its critical role in preserving surface biomes. To foster timely global conservation of groundwater, we propose elevating the concept of keystone species into the realm of ecosystems, claiming groundwater as a keystone ecosystem that influences the integrity of many dependent ecosystems. Our global analysis shows that over half of land surface areas (52.6%) has a medium‐to‐high interaction with groundwater, reaching up to 74.9% when deserts and high mountains are excluded. We postulate that the intrinsic transboundary features of groundwater are critical for shifting perspectives towards more holistic approaches in aquatic ecology and beyond. Furthermore, we propose eight key themes to develop a science‐policy integrated groundwater conservation agenda. Given ecosystems above and below the ground intersect at many levels, considering groundwater as an essential component of planetary health is pivotal to reduce biodiversity loss and buffer against climate change.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem

Saccò,

Mammola,

Altermatt

et al. 2023

Global Change Biology

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“…In the Mediterranean Sea, underwater caves, usually formed by rocky walls with different cavities and dark or semi-dark conditions, offer an environment that attracts a multitude of species, constituting a great focus of biodiversity in our seas. The more than 3,000 known caves in the Mediterranean Sea are the subject of many studies due to their particular environmental conditions, low ecological resilience, and the presence of many species of conservation interest [1,2] . Among the sessile species, sponges are the dominant group, with a total of 311 species of all Porifera classes recorded, which represents 45.7% of Mediterranean Porifera [3] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although a large number of fragile benthic communities inhabit the interior of underwater caves, the existing knowledge about these habitats, and, in particular, multi-year studies, are very scarce [4] . This is due to access difficulties and sampling limitations that make it difficult to create detailed habitats cartography, species inventories, and studies of community dynamics or damage assessment [2,5,6] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Density estimation of the main structuring sessile species in underwater marine caves with a deep learning approach

Sierra,

Prado,

Rodríguez-Cobo

et al. 2023

JGC

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Monitoring marine biodiversity is a challenge in some vulnerable and difficult-to-access habitats, such as underwater caves. Underwater caves are a great focus of biodiversity, concentrating a large number of species in their environment. However, most of the sessile species that live on the rocky walls are very vulnerable, and they are often threatened by different pressures. The use of these spaces as a destination for recreational divers can cause different impacts on the benthic habitat. In this work, we propose a methodology based on video recordings of cave walls and image analysis with deep learning algorithms to estimate the spatial density of structuring species in a study area. We propose a combination of automatic frame overlap detection, estimation of the actual extent of surface cover, and semantic segmentation of the main 10 species of corals and sponges to obtain species density maps. These maps can be the data source for monitoring biodiversity over time. In this paper, we analyzed the performance of three different semantic segmentation algorithms and backbones for this task and found that the Mask R-CNN model with the Xception101 backbone achieves the best accuracy, with an average segmentation accuracy of 82%.

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“…Within the marine realm, most of our current knowledge comes from the investigation of shallow coastal habitats and depths that can be easily reached with various sampling techniques (i.e., 0-30 m). Our knowledge of the mesophotic (30-200 m) and deep-sea habitats (>200 m) is limited and generally linked to the development of new technologies and sampling techniques [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sponges account for around 6% of the recorded invertebrate diversity in the Mediterranean [23] and 14.4% of the megabenthic invertebrate taxa reported as trawl bycatch from the Mediterranean soft-bottom grounds [26]. Even though in recent years the importance of sponges in deep-water Mediterranean ecosystems has been recognized, and sponge dominated deep-sea habitats are considered remarkable [1,27], the impacts of direct and indirect anthropogenic activities, such as bottom trawling and global climate change, on deep-sea sponge ecosystems have not yet been extensively studied [28,29]. Deep-sea sponge assemblages are considered "vulnerable marine ecosystems" (VME), a term coined by the United Nations to identify species, communities or habitats vulnerable to fishing activities [30].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sponge Community Patterns in Mesophotic and Deep-Sea Habitats in the Aegean and Ionian Seas

Stamouli,

Gerovasileiou,

Voultsiadou

2023

JMSE

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Sponge assemblages play a significant role in the functioning of the Mediterranean benthic ecosystem. The main goal of this study was to investigate the diversity and distribution of poorly known sponge communities in the mesophotic and deep-sea substrates of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. More than 1500 sponge specimens belonging to 87 taxa were collected from 156 stations during experimental and commercial bottom trawling in the Aegean Sea and the eastern part of the Ionian ecoregion, at depths of between 10 and 800 m. A total of 79 sponge species were found in the Aegean and 40 species in the Ionian Sea. Eight of these species are included in lists of endangered and threatened species, two were newly recorded in the Aegean and six were first recorded in the east Ionian Sea. Both community structure and diversity differed between the two ecoregions. Species richness, biomass, abundance and diversity decreased with increasing depth, while different species dominated, in terms of biomass, abundance and frequency of appearance, in the two ecoregions and the separate depth zones. In contrast with previous investigations, which mostly examined shallow-water sponges, no clear resemblance patterns were observed among the north and south Aegean subareas, probably due to the homogeneity of the deep-sea habitats under investigation. This study, using sampling material from fish stock monitoring programs for the first time, contributed to our knowledge of the largely unknown eastern Mediterranean mesophotic and deep-sea sponge populations, which are subjected to intensive trawling activities.

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Conservation of dark habitats

Cited by 7 publications

References 205 publications

Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem

Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem

Density estimation of the main structuring sessile species in underwater marine caves with a deep learning approach

Sponge Community Patterns in Mesophotic and Deep-Sea Habitats in the Aegean and Ionian Seas

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