Carlos M. Duarte

Carlos M. Duarte
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology | KAUST · Department of Bioscience

Ph.D. in Biology

About

1,299
Publications
777,055
Reads
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127,604
Citations
Additional affiliations
June 1999 - present
University of the Balearic Islands
Position
  • Professor
October 2011 - January 2015
University of Western Australia
Position
  • Managing Director
July 1989 - present
Spanish National Research Council
Position
  • Professor
Education
January 1984 - September 1987
McGill University
Field of study
  • Limnology

Publications

Publications (1,299)
Article
Full-text available
Macroalgae play a crucial role in blue carbon ecosystems, yet their elemental compositions in the Red Sea are not well documented. This study examined the concentrations of 22 elements in 161 macroalgae blade samples from 19 species (5 unidentified) across 3 phyla in the Saudi Arabian Red Sea. Macroalgae blades collected from coral reef habitats ex...
Preprint
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Tropical coral reefs are undergoing unprecedented degradation ¹ , primarily due to the increasing intensity and frequency of marine heatwaves with climate change ²⁻⁴ . Coral bleaching is a well–known ramification of marine heatwaves, but rapid coral mortality is an emerging paradigm that visually manifests as the ′sloughing′ of tissue from the cora...
Article
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Combating climate change and achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are two important challenges facing humanity. Natural climate solutions (NCSs) can contribute to the achievement of these two commitments but can also generate conflicting trade‐offs. Here, we reviewed the literature and drew on expert knowledge to assess the co‐bene...
Article
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Climate change is shifting animal distributions. However, the extent to which future global habitats of threatened marine megafauna will overlap existing human threats remains unresolved. Here we use global climate models and habitat suitability estimated from long-term satellite-tracking data of the world’s largest fish, the whale shark, to show t...
Article
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Coral reefs, vital ecosystems supporting diverse marine life, are primarily shaped by the clonal expansion of coral colonies. Although the principles of coral clonal growth, involving polyp division for spatial extension, are well-understood, numerical modelling efforts are notably scarce in the literature. In this article, we present a parsimoniou...
Article
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Documenting large-scale patterns of animals in the ocean and determining the drivers of these patterns is needed for conservation efforts given the unprecedented rates of change occurring within marine ecosystems. We used existing datasets from two global expeditions, Tara Oceans and Malaspina, that circumnavigated the oceans and sampled down to 40...
Article
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Seagrass meadows store significant amounts of carbonate (CaCO3) in sediment, contributing to coastal protection but potentially offsetting their effectiveness as carbon sinks. Understanding the accumulation of CaCO3 and its balance with organic carbon (Corg) in seagrass ecosystems is crucial for developing seagrass-based blue carbon strategies for...
Article
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Amylin is part of the endocrine pancreatic system that contributes to glycemic control, regulating blood glucose levels. However, human amylin has a high tendency to aggregate, forming isolated amylin deposits that are observed in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. In search of new inhibitors of amylin aggregation, we undertook the chemical an...
Article
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The northeastern Red Sea (Saudi Arabia) is currently being transformed to become a global hub of economic activity and tourism. This transformation requires the development of pristine coastal areas into populated and dynamic settlements. At the same time, the northern Red Sea is considered a climate refuge for corals in changing climate conditions...
Article
The ocean’s mercury (Hg) content has tripled due to anthropogenic activities, and although the dark ocean (>200 m) has become an important Hg reservoir, concentrations of the toxic and bioaccumulative methylmercury (MeHg) are low and therefore very difficult to measure. As a consequence, the current understanding of the Hg cycle in the deep ocean i...
Preprint
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The automatic classification of animal sounds presents an enduring challenge in bioacoustics, owing to the diverse statistical properties of sound signals, variations in recording equipment, and prevalent low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) conditions. Deep learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) have...
Article
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The hadopelagic environment remains highly understudied due to the inherent difficulties in sampling at these depths. The use of sediment environmental DNA (eDNA) can overcome some of these restrictions as settled and preserved DNA represent an archive of the biological communities. We use sediment eDNA to assess changes in the community within one...
Article
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Ocean warming reduces O2 solubility and increases organismal O2 demand, endangering marine life. Coastal ecosystems, however, experience O2 supersaturation during peak daytime temperatures due to metabolic cycles. Recent discoveries show that this environmental supersaturation can reduce the vulnerability of tropical species to warming by satisfyin...
Preprint
Full-text available
Macroalgae are vital components of blue carbon ecosystems, yet their elemental compositions in the Red Sea are not well understood. This study analyzed 22 elements in 161 macroalgae blades from 13 species in the Saudi Arabian Red Sea. Macroalgae from coral reefs had higher K, As, and Sr but lower TN (Total nitrogen), Na, Mg, Al, P, S, Cr, Mn, Fe, a...
Article
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The Red Sea is a hotspot of biodiversity susceptible to oil pollution. Besides, it is one of the warmest seas on the Earth with highly transparent waters. In this study, we estimated the oil dissolution rates under natural sunlight spectra and temperature conditions using coastal oil slicks collected after the 2019 Sabiti oil spill in the Red Sea....
Article
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The reduction in sea ice cover with Arctic warming facilitates shipping through remarkably shorter shipping routes. Automatic identification system (AIS) is a powerful data source to monitor Arctic Ocean shipping. Based on the AIS data from an online platform, we quantified the spatial distribution of shipping through this area, its intensity, and...
Article
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The coastal ocean represents an important global carbon sink and is a focus for interventions to mitigate climate change and meet the Paris Agreement targets while supporting biodiversity and other ecosystem functions. However, the fate of the flux of carbon exported from seaweed forests—the world’s largest coastal vegetated ecosystem—is a key unkn...
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Black corals (Hexacorallia: Antipatharia) are a major component of mesophotic and deep marine ecosystems. Due to their preference for light deprived environments, black corals have historically been considered azooxanthellate, yet recent works have found them in association with dinoflagellates of the family Symbiodiniaceae down to 396 m depth. Whi...
Article
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The Red Sea supports a diverse array of macrophyte species, including mangroves and seagrasses. Our study quantified the concentrations of 22 common elements, including trace metals, in mangrove and seagrass leaves and sediments to investigate the current pollution level in the Saudi Arabian Red Sea blue carbon habitat. Mangrove leaves were found t...
Article
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Coral-dwelling gall crabs (Cryptochiridae) live in an obligate symbiosis with reef-building corals from shallow to deep waters. In particular, crabs of the genus Opecarcinus are known to occur across the tropical belt in association with the scleractinian family Agariciidae, down to a depth of 89 m. The Red Sea is a semi-enclosed basin that has lon...
Article
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Introduction The Red Sea is a narrow rift basin characterized by latitudinal environmental gradients which shape the diversity and distribution of reef-dwelling organisms. Studies on Symbiodiniaceae associated with select hard coral taxa present species- specific assemblages and concordant variation patterns from the North to southeast Red Sea coas...
Article
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Automated positioning devices can generate large datasets with information on the movement of humans, animals and objects, revealing patterns of movement, hot spots and overlaps among others. However, in the case of Automated Information Systems (AIS), attached to vessels, observed strange behaviors in the tracking datasets may come from intentiona...
Article
Deep-ocean seaweed dumping is not an ecological, economical, or ethical answer to climate-change mitigation via carbon ‘‘sequestration.’’ Without sound science and sufficient knowledge on impacts to these fragile ecosystems, it distracts from more rational and effective blue-carbon interventions. We call for a moratorium on sinking seaweeds to deep...
Article
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Climate change impact syntheses, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consistently assert that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C is unlikely to safeguard most of the world’s coral reefs. This prognosis is primarily based on a small subset of available models that apply similar ‘excess heat’ threshold methodologies. Our sy...
Preprint
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The reduction in sea ice cover with Arctic warming facilitates the transit of ships through routes that are remarkably shorter than the traditional shipping routes. Automatic Identification System (AIS), ideally designed to avoid vessel collisions, transmits on vessel navigation information (currently 27 types of messages) such as name, position or...
Article
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Measurements of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), nitrogen (DON), and phosphorus (DOP) concentrations are used to characterize the dissolved organic matter (DOM) pool and are important components of biogeochemical cycling in the coastal ocean. Here, we present the first edition of a global database (CoastDOM v1; available at 10.1594/PANGAEA.964012, L...
Article
Over the last decades, soft corals have been proven a rich source of biologically active compounds, featuring a wide range of chemical structures. Herein, we investigated the chemistry of an alcyonarian of the genus Lemnalia (Neptheidae), specimens of which were collected from the coral reefs near Al Lith, on the south‐west coast of Saudi Arabia. A...
Article
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Mangrove forests are recognized as one of the most effective ecosystems for storing carbon. In drylands, mangroves operate at the extremes of environmental gradients and, in many instances, offer one of the few opportunities for vegetation-based sequestering of carbon. Developing accurate and reproducible methods to map carbon assimilation in mangr...
Article
Due to the scarcity of organic matter (OM) sources in the bathypelagic (1000–4000 m depth), prokaryotic metabolism is believed to be concentrated on particles originating from the surface. However, the structure of active bathypelagic prokaryotic communities and how it changes across environmental gradients remains unexplored. Using a combination o...
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The Ocean microbiome has a crucial role in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. During the last decade, global cruises such as Tara Oceans and the Malaspina Expedition have expanded our understanding of the diversity and genetic repertoire of marine microbes. Nevertheless, there are still knowledge gaps regarding their diversity patterns throughout depth...
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Rhodaliids, a specific family of siphonophores inhabiting the benthic zone, have remained enigmatic due to their rarity and elusive nature. These unique organisms, primarily found in open ocean habitats, exhibit distinctive features and are characterized by complex structures. During the Red Sea Decade Expedition, two rhodaliid specimens were colle...
Article
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Our ability to assess biodiversity at relevant spatial and temporal scales for informing management is of increasing importance given this is foundational to identify and mitigate the impacts of global change. Collecting baseline information and tracking ecological changes are particularly important for areas experiencing rapid changes and represen...
Article
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A persistent microbial seed bank is postulated to sustain the marine biosphere, and recent findings show that prokaryotic taxa present in the ocean’s surface dominate prokaryotic communities throughout the water column. Yet, environmental conditions exert a tight control on the activity of prokaryotes, and drastic changes in these conditions are kn...
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The global ocean genome (the pool of genes in marine organisms and the functional information they encode) is a major, untapped resource for science and society with a growing range of biotechnology applications in sectors such as biomedicine, energy, and food. Shotgun sequencing and metagenomics can now be used to catalog the diversity of ocean mi...
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Life has been evolving in the oceans much longer than it has on land, resulting in highly diverse ocean organisms—particularly microbes like bacteria and archaea. Ocean microbes perform crucial functions that influence the health of the ocean and ultimately impact Earth’s climate. To understand the diversity and functions of marine organisms, scien...
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The Red Sea has been recognized as a coral reef refugia, but it is vulnerable to warming and pollution. Here we investigated the spatial and temporal trends of 15 element concentrations in 9 coral reef sediment cores (aged from the 1460s to the 1980s AD) to study the influence of global warming and industrialization on the Eastern Red Sea coral ree...
Article
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Microbial interactions are vital in maintaining ocean ecosystem function, yet their dynamic nature and complexity remain largely unexplored. Here, we use association networks to investigate possible ecological interactions in the marine microbiome among archaea, bacteria, and picoeukaryotes throughout different depths and geographical regions of th...
Article
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The tropical seagrass Halophila stipulacea invaded the Eastern Mediterranean Sea in the late nineteenth century and progressively spread throughout the basin ever since. Its spread is expected to continue north-westward as the Mediterranean Sea becomes warmer, potentially changing the seagrass biogeography of the basin. Given the power of genomics...
Article
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Seagrass meadows are important sinks for organic carbon and provide co-benefits. However, data on the organic carbon stock in seagrass sediments are scarce for many regions, particularly The Bahamas, which accounts for up to 40.7% of the documented global seagrass area, limiting formulation of blue carbon strategies. Here, we sampled 10 seagrass me...
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Tiny ocean plankton (picoplankton) are fundamental for the functioning of the biosphere, but the ecological mechanisms shaping their biogeography were partially understood. Comprehending whether these microorganisms are structured by niche versus neutral processes is relevant in the context of global change. We investigate the ecological processes...
Technical Report
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Over recent years the number of studies on the assisted evolution of corals has increased dramatically, with most able to demonstrate enhanced tolerance of the coral holobiont (that is, the cnidarian host, the photosynthetic symbionts and other microbes), (Drury et al., 2022 and more). Yet significant knowledge gaps exist in our fundamental underst...
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Northern elephant seals engage in large-scale foraging migrations traveling up to 15,000 Km over 8 months in the northeast Pacific. While traditionally considered solitary migrants, we demonstrate here that female seals migrate in a surprisingly coherent manner, for individual northern elephant seals traveling in over such a large region of the oce...
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Bycatch is a major global threat to marine megafauna and occurs in nearly all fishing fleets, including small-scale fisheries that use gillnets. Gillnets represent a threat to endangered air-breathing megafauna, who incidentally entangle in bottom-set gillnets and suffocate after being attracted by bait that is secured on fishing gear. We here prov...
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Observations are essential to explore and discover the ocean. The rapid advancements in technology have revolutionized our capacity to document the ocean and its diverse array of species, pushing the boundaries of our understanding further than ever before. The central Red Sea was exposed as part of the Red Sea Decade Expedition, which took place f...
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Understanding the vertical distribution of elasmobranch species and associated ecological dynamics can be a crucial component of developing effective conservation strategies, particularly in light of their global population decline. Previous studies have primarily focused on horizontal extent and movement patterns of elasmobranchs, with limited kno...
Article
Despite covering a large amount of seafloor & representing a significant percentage of coral reef ecosystem biomass, Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems (MCEs) globally have been largely understudied in comparison to their shallow counterparts. The Red Sea is a unique and biodiverse tropical ecosystem, where few mesophotic coral reefs have been studied. To...
Preprint
Full-text available
The measurements of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), nitrogen (DON), and phosphorus (DOP) are used to characterize the dissolved organic matter (DOM) pool and are important components of biogeochemical cycling in the coastal ocean. Here, we present the first edition of a global database (CoastDOM v1; available at https://figshare.com/s/512289eb43c4f...
Article
Full-text available
The diversity and evolution of the Red Sea invertebrates in mesophotic and deep-water benthic ecosystems remain largely unexplored. The Palaemonidae is a diversified family of caridean shrimps with numerous taxa in need of taxonomic revisions based on recent molecular analyses. The Red Sea mesophotic and bathyal palaemonid shrimps are largely unstu...
Article
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Oceans are crucial to human survival, providing natural resources and most of the global oxygen supply, and are responsible for a large portion of worldwide economic development. Although it is widely considered a silent world, the sea is filled with natural sounds generated by marine life and geological processes. Man-made underwater sounds, such...
Article
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Traditional culture techniques usually retrieve a small fraction of the marine microbial diversity, which mainly belong to the so-called rare biosphere. However, this paradigm has not been fully tested at a broad scale, especially in the deep ocean. Here, we examined the fraction of heterotrophic bacterial communities in photic and deep ocean layer...