Filipa Bessa

• PhD in Biosciences (Marine Ecology)
• Assistant Researcher | Centre for Functional Ecology - Science for People & the Planet (CFE) at University of Coimbra

Sandy beaches are natural dynamic ecosystems, which are becoming worldwide increasingly disturbedby intensive human direct use, coastal development and erosive evolution. In this study, we have exam-ined whether ten years of potential increased human pressures have resulted in significant changes inthe macrofaunal assemblages’ structure and composi...

a b s t r a c t Wrack supplies (macroalgae, seagrasses and carrion) are a common feature of sandy beaches worldwide. These allochthonous inputs are a potential high-quality food subsidy for beach fauna, but little is known about the feeding ecology and niche segregation strategies of these species in beaches with limited wrack availabilities. We us...

a b s t r a c t Environmental and human controls are widely accepted as the main structuring forces of the macrofauna communities on sandy beaches. A population of the talitrid amphipod Talitrus saltator (Montagu, 1808) was investigated on an exposed sandy beach on the Atlantic coast of Portugal (Leirosa beach) to estimate orientation capabilities...

Coastal ecosystems are under increasing threat, with the accumulation of marine debris-particularly plastics posing significant ecological risks. Oceanic islands are especially vulnerable due to ocean currents depositing marine debris on their exposed shores. This study presents the first assessment of marine debris accumulation on sandy beaches of...

The Mondego Estuary (W Portugal) experienced a process of eutrophication in the late 20th century, making it one of the most impacted systems in southern Europe. To examine its recent environmental evolution, sedimentary records were analyzed from a multiproxy approach, involving biotic, sedimentological, geochemical, physical, and radionuclide dat...

Marine turtles’ nesting grounds face imminent threats from urbanisation, climate change, and pollution. In this study, we estimated the vulnerability of loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) nesting beaches in Cabo Verde, one of the largest rookeries globally. We surveyed 61 sandy beach segments (~ 100 m) with a drone and modelled nest density by in...

Global trends in marine turtle nesting numbers vary by region, influenced by environmental or anthropogenic factors. Our study investigates the potential role of past temperature fluctuations on these trends, particularly whether warmer beaches are linked to increased nesting due to higher female production (since sea turtles have temperature‐depen...

Anthropogenic litter, such as plastic, is investigated by the global scientific community from various fields employing diverse techniques. The goal is to assess and finally mitigate the pollutants' impacts on the natural environment. Plastic litter can accumulate in different matrices of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, impacting both biota and...

Plastic pollution poses global and societal concerns, especially from discarded fishing gear, threatening seabed environments like coral reefs. This study examines the incorporation of lost and/or abandoned fishing gear - specifically synthetic lines, and filaments - into the structure of orange tree coral, Dendrophyllia ramea along the coast of Po...

In the context of marine litter monitoring, reporting the weight of beached litter can contribute to a better understanding of pollution sources and support clean-up activities. However, the litter scaling task requires considerable effort and specific equipment. This experimental study proposes and evaluates three methods to estimate beached litt...

Santa Luzia, an uninhabited island in the archipelago of Cabo Verde, serves as a natural laboratory and important nesting site for loggerhead turtles Caretta caretta. The island constitutes an Integral Natural Reserve and a Marine Protected Area. We assessed marine litter accumulation on sandy beaches of the island and analysed their spatial patter...

As urbanization expands, so does the presence of anthropogenic materials within bird’s nests. However, our understanding of this phenomenon remains limited, particularly in terrestrial birds. This study describes and compares the use of anthropogenic materials in great tit (Parus major) and blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) nests in relation to the in...

The use of anthropogenic materials by birds in the construction of their nests has been increasing considerably due to the increasing urbanization. However, the incorporation of these materials in bird’s nests, particularly in terrestrial birds, remains poorly studied. This study describes and compares the use of anthropogenic materials in Great ti...

Plastic pollution is a global environmental issue affecting multiple ecosystems, namely sea turtle nesting grounds. We analysed the potential chemical contamination caused by plastic debris in loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) nests, focusing on polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs, a class of flame retardants). For that, we conducted a field ex...

Galician rías provide several ecosystem services of great ecological and economic significance in the northwestern Iberian margin, requiring a good environmental quality for sustainable harnessing. More paleoenvironmental reconstructions extending to their preindustrial state are needed to predict their evolution under natural and human-induced per...

Oceans have been considered as an unlimited supply of goods and services, but resource extraction and waste disposal became ubiquitous and have been damaging the health of marine ecosystems. Finding suitable sentinel species of the human impacts on the oceans is thus imperative, since they may work as early warnings of disruptive situations. In thi...

Background: Marine pollution, caused by anthropogenic debris, is a significant environmental issue that has detrimental effects on marine ecosystems [1]. Finding suitable sentinel species of the human impacts on the oceans, is imperative. As top predators, seabirds are considered sentinels of the marine environment [2]. Objective: To provide quanti...

NEWSERA Blueprints for citizen science communication (#citscicomm) with and for quadruple helix stakeholders (citizens and society at large, academic scientists, public sector and policymakers, industry and SMES) and science and data journalists is an instrument that can serve a general audience, including those who are planning to start a citizen...

Marine plastic contamination is currently considered ubiquitous in aquatic environments. These particles present a resistant and hydrophobic substrate known to promote microbial colonisation and biofilm formation in aquatic ecosystems, the so-called "Plastisphere", raising concerns about its potential ecological risks. The novelty of this topic tra...

Coastal urbanization, plastic pollution and climate change are increasingly affecting marine turtles' nesting habitats. In addition to facing risks of mortality due to saltwater inundation or predation, their eggs and hatchlings' might also be affected by plastic debris accumulation on beaches, but no studies to date have analysed such impact. To a...

The abundance of beach litter has been increasing globally during the last decades, and it is an issue of global concern. A new survey strategy, based on uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV, aka drones), has been recently adopted to improve the monitoring of beach macro-litter items abundance and distribution. This work identified and analysed the 15 stu...

An overview of UAS4Litter experiences and publications (Nov. 2021)

The assessment of contaminant exposure in marine organisms often focuses on the most toxic chemical elements from upper trophic level species. Information on mid-trophic level species and particularly on potentially less harmful elements is lacking. Additionally, microplastics have been considered emergent contaminants in aquatic environments which...

The use of plastics has been increasing dramatically in the last decades, and consequently plastics and microplastics have been considered emergent contaminants in aquatic environments. The occurrence of microplastics has been reported in several marine species worldwide, however species from mid-trophic chains have not been extensively studied. Th...

This work analyses the cross-shore (80 m) and long-shore (200 m) spatial and size distribution of macro-litter on coastal dunes, employing a mapping framework based on an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS, aka drone) and a GIS mobile application. Over the cross-shore, plastic percentage increased from 60% to 90% landwards. The largest items (processed wo...

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS, aka drones) are being used to map macro-litter on the environment. Sixteen qualified researchers (operators), with different expertise and nationalities, were invited to identify, mark and categorize the litter items (manual image screening, MS) on three UAS images collected at two beaches. The coefficient of concordan...

Riverine systems act as converging pathways for discarded litter within drainage basins, becoming key elements in gauging the transfer of mismanaged waste into the ocean. However, riverine litter data are scarce and biased towards microplastics, generally lacking information about larger items. Based on the first ever database of riverine floating...

Microplastics (< 5mm in size) is known to be widespread in the marine environment, but it is still poorly studied in Polar Regions, particularly in the Antarctic. As penguins have a wide distribution around Antarctica, three congeneric species, Adélie (Pygoscelis adeliae), chinstrap (Pygoscelis antarcticus) and gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) wer...

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, aka drones) are being used to map marine macro-litter on the coast. Within the UAS4Litter project, the application of UAS has been applied on three sandy beachdune systems on the wave-dominated North Atlantic Portuguese coast. Several technical solutions have been tested in terms of drone mapping performance, manual im...

Microplastics (MP) have been confirmed as emerging pollutants in the marine environment due to their ubiquity, bioavailability, persistence and potential toxicity. This study contributes with valuable data regarding the abundance and characteristics of the MP found in five species collected from Portugal. The mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis (n = 1...

Papers published by the UAS4LITTER team

Portugal’s famous coastline consists of hundreds of miles of sandy beaches. It’s no surprise that urbanisation in the region – a result of tourism and fishing activities – has led to the accumulation of marine litter in these areas. But while local organisations focus their efforts on beach cleaning to keep tourist spots looking pristine, nearby sa...

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have recently been proven to be valuable remote sensing tools for detecting marine macro litter (MML), with the potential of supporting pollution monitoring programs on coasts. Very low altitude images, acquired with a low-cost RGB camera onboard a UAS on a sandy beach, were used to characterize the abundance of stran...

This work shows an integrated approach for coastal environmental monitoring, which aimed to understand the relation between beach-dune morphodynamics, marine litter abundance and environmental forcing. Three unmanned aerial system (UAS) flights were deployed on a beach-dune system at the Atlantic Portuguese coast to assess two main goals: (i) quant...

Marine litter pollution on coastal dunes has received limited scientific attention when compared with sandy shores. This paper proposes a new framework based on the combined use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and a mobile application to map and quantify marine macro-litter (>2.5 cm) accumulation on coastal dunes. The first application on a dune a...

Microplastics (MP) pollution has received increased attention over the last few years. However, while the number of studies documentating the ingestion of microplastics by fish has increased, fewer studies have addressed the toxicological effects derived from the ingestion of these small items in wild conditions. Here, MP contamination and effect b...

The amount of marine litter, mainly composed by plastic materials, has become a global environmental issue in coastal environments. Traditional monitoring programs are based on in-situ visual census, which require human effort and are time-demanding. Therefore, it is crucial to implement innovative mapping strategies to improve the environmental mo...

There is growing evidence that microplastic pollution (<5 mm in size) is now present in virtually all marine ecosystems, even in remote areas, such as the Arctic and the Antarctic. Microplastics have been found in water and sediments of the Antarctic but little is known of their ingestion by higher predators and mechanisms of their entry into Antar...

Organisms’ traits are increasingly being targeted to describe systems and their functionality. In ecological studies, analysis of traits’ as units are largely applied to communities, while the application of traits to taxonomic levels is receiving less attention. The project “Talitraits” was launched to target: 1) a relatively low taxonomic level,...

Here we summarize the overarching issues that emerged from a workshop held to discuss scientific challenges and future directions on the use of numerical models to predict the amount, distribution and effects of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems. The need for multidisciplinary approaches, standardized protocols for plastic quantification and a...

The Department of Earth Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra, the MARE-Centre for Marine and Environmental Sciences and the IATV-Institute for the Environment Technology and Life took over the organization of the XI Symposium on the Iberian Atlantic Margin (MIA 2018). The study of the continental margins...

Microplastic pollution is presently considered a high concern topic by scientists, policy makers, governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations and the general public. Microplastics are highly widespread in all environmental compartments (e.g. air, water, sediments and biota) and increasing empirical evidence points towards potential negative...

Sand-hoppers and beach-hoppers (Amphipoda, Talitridae) are well known as key species of sandy beach ecosystems. Behavioural traits (e.g., orientation) and their variation have been extensively studied in different contexts and proposed as bioindicator of impacts on coastlines. To assess the common sun orientation strategy and its potential use as a...

The JRC exploratory project RIMMEL provides information about litter, mainly plastic waste, entering the European Seas through river systems. RIMMEL has collected data on riverine floating macro litter inputs to the sea. Data acquisition was based on the Riverine Litter Observation Network (RiLON) activities, which collected data from rivers in the...

Floating marine litter is known to be currently a widespread pollution problem, especially in the Mediterranean basin, but records on the levels of floating debris in the eastern part are less known. By using an observation platform (32 days, 137 transects, 1784 km), this study provides evidence of a high amount of floating debris in the Levantine...

Marine anthropogenic litter has long been recognised as an emerging pollutant of global concern. Its ubiquitous distribution and its direct and indirect impacts on aquatic ecosystems, marine fauna and local economies have been recently highlighted by several studies and international organisations around the world. Although comprised of different m...

Microplastic ingestion has been reported for several marine species, but the level of contamination in transitional systems and associated biota is less known. The aim of this study was to assess the occurrence of microplastic ingestion in three commercial fish species: the sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax), the seabream (Diplodus vulgaris) and the f...

Ocean sandy beaches are prime sites for human recreation. The integrity of these ecosystems may suffer greatly from tourism-related pressures. Behavioural adaptations of fauna are key traits as responses to environmental pressures and short time changes. In particular, orientation performance of talitrid amphipods to recover the optimal zone on the...

In the last decades the increasing urban development on coastal areas have produced extensive mod-ifications on shores all over the world, making critical the active management of pressures on sandy beaches. The use of engineering solutions to counteract beach erosion has been significantly increasing; the ecological indicators used to monitor thes...

a b s t r a c t The main goal of this study was to evaluate the response of intertidal macrobenthic communities asso-ciated with Zostera noltii meadows in a temperate estuary (Mondego, Portugal) to the application of mitigation measures aimed at decreasing eutrophication symptoms. In order to assess possible ecologi-cal improvements regarding the s...

Parasitism is increasingly recognized as an important factor that can influence the structure and function of natural communities. The presence of externae of the parasite Sacculina carcini Thompson, 1836 was investigated in a population of the crab Carcinus maenas (Linnaeus, 1758) from the Mondego estuary, Portugal. A seasonal pattern of the S. ca...

This study provides a comprehensive examination of the life cycle dynamics of the brown shrimp (Crangon crangon L.) in the Mondego estuary, Portugal, a habitat located near the southern edge of the range of this species in European waters. The phenology of all life stages was documented (from the occurrence of ovigerous females, developing embryos,...

Seasonal and temporal variations in population dynamics of the Carcinus maenas (L.): the effect of an extreme drought event in a southern European estuary—CORRIGENDUM - Volume 91 Issue 8 - Filipa Bessa, Alexandra Baeta, Filipe Martinho, Sónia Marques, Miguel Ângelo Pardal

The temporal and spatial variability in population dynamics of the European crab Carcinus maenas (L.) was studied between June 2003 and September 2007 in the Mondego estuary. An extreme climate event (extreme drought) occurred in 2004 and 2005 with a low freshwater flow discharge into the estuary, leading to an increase in salinity. Juveniles' recr...