Free Espinosa

University of Seville | US · Zoología

The use of ancient DNA has been proven to be a powerful tool in phylogenetic and phylogeographic studies. Nonetheless, its application in the field of conservation has been limited. Moreover, marine mollusc shells are well preserved in the fossil record, providing invaluable information about the past. However, the extraction of DNA from ancient sh...

The usefulness of restoration programs and Artificial Marine Micro Reserves (AMMRs) to preserve corals within the context of the Anthropocene.

Astroides calycularis es un coral ahermatípico endémico del mar Mediterráneo y amenazado a la extinción por la acción del hombre. Conocer su ecología y los factores que influyen en su distribución será útil para futuros programas de conservación. Con el fin de indagar en uno de estos factores exógenos, y en su influencia sobre el coral naranja, se...

Cladocora caespitosa es el único coral zooxantelado formador de arrecifes endémico del mar Mediterráneo y, actualmente, está amenazado. Por ello, conocer los factores que influyen en su desarrollo es de gran importancia para conservar la especie. Con el fin de aumentar el conocimiento sobre C. caespitosa se ha realizado, a lo largo de tres años, un...

Patella ferruginea, an endemic marine mollusc of the western Mediterranean, faces a severe threat due to historical overexploitation, habitat loss and habitat vulnerability. This specie forms reproductive populations on sheltered dikes within Alboran Sea ports, presenting a persistent management challenge. Investigating both recruitment rates and p...

The substitution of natural habitats with artificial structures, such as coastal defence structures, has significantly detrimental effects on the marine biological community. In this context, the application of ecological engineering to marine ecosystems presents an opportunity to mitigate these environmental impacts and enhance ecosystem services....

In the marine environment, greening of grey infrastructure (GGI) is a rapidly growing field that attempts to encourage native marine life to colonize marine artificial structures to enhance biodiversity, thereby promoting ecosystem functioning and hence service provision. By designing multifunctional sea defences, breakwaters, port complexes and of...

Artificial shorelines often differ from natural reefs in shape, composition, and habitat complexity. They promote higher accumulation of pollutants and increased physiological stress, which lead to changes in species distributions and ecosystem functioning. This can promote trophic shifts and reduced genetic diversity of gastropod populations inhab...

The use of ancient DNA has been proven to be a powerful tool in phylogenetic and phylogeographic studies. Nonetheless, its application in the field of conservation has been limited. Moreover, marine mollusc shells are well preserved in the fossil record, providing invaluable information about the past. However, the extraction of DNA from ancient sh...

The use of ancient DNA has been proved as a powerful tool in phylogeny and phylogeographic studies. Nonetheless, its application in the field of conservation has been limited. Moreover, marine mollusc shells are well-preserved in the fossil record, providing invaluable information about the past. However, the extraction of DNA from ancient shells c...

Marinas contribute to the degradation of coastal ecosystems, constitute non-indigenous species (NIS) hotspots and function as steppingstones in invasion processes. These often enclose highly modified water bodies that promote the concentration of pollutants and propagules, favoring NIS abundance. In these habitats, floating structures are often the...

1. Limpets play an important role in structuring the intertidal fringe, one of the most heavily impacted marine habitats. A large number of limpet species are listed as Endangered or Vulnerable, including Patella ferruginea, one of the most endangered marine invertebrates in the Mediterranean Sea. 2. Relocation attempts have been made as a conserva...

Limpets play an important role in structuring the intertidal fringe, one of the most heavily impacted marine habitats. A large number of limpet species are listed as Endangered or Vulnerable, including Patella ferruginea , one of the most endangered marine invertebrates in the Mediterranean Sea. Relocation attempts have been made as a conservation...

This study provides information about the reproductive cycle of the invasive side-gilled sea slug Pleurobranchaea maculata, currently widely distributed along the Argentine coast. The histological analysis of this simultaneous hermaphrodite showed characteristics of a semelparous species with an annual life cycle. The highest spermatogenic and ooge...

The critically endangered species Patella ferruginea (Gastropoda, Patellidae), endemic to the western Mediterranean, has breeding populations in both natural and artificial habitats, the latter of which are generally linked to port infrastructures. Over the past decade, the temporal change of this species’ population has been monitored (structure a...

Patella ferruginea (Gastropoda, Patellidae) is an endemic and endangered marine invertebrate species from the Western Mediterranean that presents two ecomorphotypes. Currently, there is no objective and nonmanipulative method to determine these ecomorphotypes in the field. The present study uses the geometric morphometrics approach to investigate v...

La contaminación por metales pesados es una de las principales amenazas de conservación para muchas especies marinas del Mediterráneo. Patella ferruginea es uno de los invertebrados marinos más amenazados del Mediterráneo, pero sobre el cual no hay apenas información disponible respecto a la contaminación y grado de afección que ésta pueda generar...

The Anthropocene era is characterized by a biodiversity crisis, where many species are pushing to extinction, causing alteration of the stability in the ecosystems and loss of their services. In this context, the translocation of endangered species is a powerful resource in conservation as long as its goals and appropriateness are clearly stated an...

Coastal sprawl is among the main drivers of global degradation of shallow marine ecosystems. Among artificial substrates, quarry rock can have faster recruitment of benthic organisms than traditional concrete, which is instead more versatile for construction. However, the factors driving these differences are poorly understood. In this context, thi...

Coastal zones provide about 70% of the world’s ecosystem services. However, more than 25% of these habitats have been modified by human activity at both land and sea. At the intertidal eco-tonal zone, habitat modification is equally severe, as almost 20% of the world’s shoreline is now artificial. Coastal defense structures are more abundant in are...

Marinas are hubs for non-indigenous species (NIS) and constitute the nodes of a network of highly modified water bodies (HMWB) connected by recreational maritime traffic. Floating structures, such as pontoons, are often the surfaces with higher NIS abundance inside marinas and lead the risk for NIS introduction, establishment and spread. However, t...

Coastal Habitat Conservation: New Perspectives and Sustainable Development of Biodiversity in the Anthropocene offers the latest research and approaches to biodiversity conservation in coastal areas. It synthesizes the background of foundational conservation views and provides new perspectives and recent strategies within a sustainable development...

Currently, multiple natural processes and pervasive direct human activities, including climate change, scale-up to adversely impact marine ecosystems. In this context, marine area-based conservation measures are one of the options available for facing these challenges. Marine protected areas (MPAs) have become a prominent conservation and managemen...

The high abundance and heterogeneity of calcareous builders on coralligenous outcrops determine the development of highly diversified and structured benthic communities. The present study provides a complete assessment of the mobile macroinvertebrate epifauna associated to four dominant sessile hosts inhabiting coralligenous outcrops at the Strait...

Seagrass habitats rank amongst the most valuable ecosystems in the biosphere. They support fisheries production, climate change mitigation, water quality improvement, and coastal protection. Faced with the current global crisis of accelerating losses of this key component of coastal environments, strong efforts have been expended within the conserv...

Climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves (MHWs) and mass mortality events (MMEs) of marine organisms are one of their main ecological impacts. Here, we show that during the 2015–2019 period, the Mediterranean Sea has experienced exceptional thermal conditions resulting in the onset of five consecutive...

Mollusc communities are getting endangered in the aftermath of urban sprawl because artificial structures do not surrogate natural substrates. In this study, we compared the diversity, community and trophic arrangements of molluscs among different models of artificial substrate and their adjacent natural rock, to detect relationships between some a...

During the Anthropocene, species are becoming extinct at unprecedented rates, a trend that will be difficult to reverse, even if we ignore the possibility of a considerable extinction debt. Among the different factors that affect the natural environment, fragmentation of ecosystems by urbanization processes can cause a reduction in species populati...

Este vídeo didáctico sobre taxonomía permite observar los colores y morfología de los equinodermos en su hábitat marino natural. El recurso complementa las prácticas de la asignatura de Zoología e incluye información útil para la identificación de especies representativas de las diferentes Clases del Filo Echinodermata: Asteroidea, Ophiuroidea, Cri...

Coralligenous habitats represent the main biodiversity hotspot in the Mediterranean Sea and foraminifera constitute a key element in this environment, both in terms of species richness and ecological functionality. Despite this, species composition and distribution trends of foraminiferal assemblages in most Mediterranean regions are poorly known....

Intertidal ecosystems are key habitats that are being replaced by artificial hard substrates due to the increment of human activities in coastal areas. These new substrates host generally less biodiversity mainly due to differences in complexity and composition. It is a global phenomenon and has led to the development of strategies in the framework...

El proyecto LIFE REMoPaF “Recuperación del Molusco Patella ferruginea en peligro de extinción” (código LIFE15 NAT/ES/000987), fue adjudicado dentro del Programa LIFE15 por la Comisión Europea en julio de 2016 con una duración de 5 años al Consorcio formado por Acciona Ingeniería (ahora denominada Ingeniería Especializada Obra Civil e Industrial), U...

• This work constitutes the first comprehensive study of the epifaunal response to biological invasions in coralligenous habitats, which are one of the main hotspots of biodiversity in the Mediterranean. • The epifaunal community inhabiting the invasive macroalga Rugulopteryx okamurae and other dominant sessile hosts on coralligenous habitats (i.e....

This is the first investigation of the potential for using Cymodocea nodosa to biomonitor trace element (TE) contamination in Marchica lagoon (Morocco), a Mediterranean pollution hotspot. We measured concentrations of seven TEs in seagrass tissues (leaf-rhizome-root) and sediments. Single and multi-element indices confirmed that sediments near ille...

Mollusc communities are getting endangered as a result of urban sprawl because artificial structures do not surrogate natural substrates. In this study, we compared diversity and community and trophic structures of molluscs among different models of artificial substrate and its adjacent natural rock, to detect relationships between some abiotic var...

Limpets are keystone species worldwide, promoting marine biodiversity in coastal areas. Of special concern are the so-called giant limpets such as Patella ferruginea, either due to their role in marine ecosystems and/or threatened status. The proliferation of artificial substrata caused by human population growth has allowed their use as a surrogat...

The Mediterranean is one of the most biodiverse and anthropogenically impacted seas and the coralligenous is one of its most diverse habitats. Its presence is indicative of well-preserved areas and its associated species are considered among the best bioindicators for monitoring nearshore rocky habitats. This study aims to report the temporal fluct...

Scutellastra mexicana: (Broderip & G.B. Sowerby I, 1829) is the largest limpet in the world and a highly endangered species from the Eastern Pacific that has faced a road to extinction during the last decades. Despite the relevance of S. mexicana, basic data, such as those relevant to its biology and ecology, have not been studied. In addition, pr...

In Morocco, Zostera marina Linnaeus has disappeared from many localities where it was historically reported. The only known remaining meadows along Mediterranean coasts of Morocco, though in North Africa, are those of Belyounech bay and Oued El Mersa bay, in the marine area of 'Jbel Moussa'. An in-depth knowledge of these meadows is required for th...

This presentation showed the LIFE project RemoPaf focused on the recovering of the endangered limpet Patella ferruginea by means of translocation procedures.

The increasing deployment of artificial structures into the marine environment is creating new hard substrates that differ from natural ones in physical and biological aspects. However, studies of macrofaunal and meiofau-nal communities associated with artificial structures are very limited. Seawalls, cubes, acropods and rip-raps in Algeciras Bay (...

This study was implemented to assess the Sessile Bioindicators in Permanent Quadrats (SBPQ) underwater environmental alert method. The SBPQ is a non-invasive and low-cost protocol; it uses sessile target species (indicators) to detect environmental alterations (natural or anthropic) at either the local or global (i.e., climate change) scale and the...

In the current frame of proliferation of artificial structures in the sea, the ecological effects of those artificial substrates on marine environments and their associate biota become a topic of great scientific and conservation-ist interest. This study was focused on the amphipod communities from western Mediterranean Sea and tested, using the sa...

Good datasets of geo-referenced records of alien species are a prerequisite for assessing the spatio-temporal dynamics of biological invasions, their invasive potential, and the magnitude of their impacts. However, with the exception of first records on a country level or wider regions, observations of species presence tend to remain unpublished, b...

Scutellastra mexicana is the largest known patellid limpet species and probably is one of the most endangered marine invertebrates. The species was once distributed along the American Pacific coast from Mexico to Peru, but their large size (up to 35 cm long) and easy accessibility (shallow sublittoral), made it very vulnerable to human collection a...

Anthropogenic climate change, and global warming in particular, has strong and increasing impacts on marine ecosystems (Poloczanska et al., 2013; Halpern et al., 2015; Smale et al., 2019). The Mediterranean Sea is considered a marine biodiversity hotspot contributing to more than 7% of world’s marine biodiversity including a high percentage of ende...

Artificial structures cover a considerable part of the Mediterranean coasts. In the Aegean Sea, most studies related to artificial structures have focused in vagile fauna on harbours and marinas but little attention has been given to the sessile biota on coastal defense structures. The aim of this work was to describe for the first time the shallow...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are considered a useful tool for marine biodiversity and ecosystems conservation and management. Nevertheless, concern has arisen about the negative effects experienced on marine reserves with low levels of protection. In terms of fish conservation, small MPAs cannot provide effective protection for highly mobile spe...

Artificial structures introduced into the marine environment are known for being a risk to local biodiversity. However, it is not rare to find endangered species established in these anthropogenic habitats, as it is the case of the limpets Cymbula safiana and Patella ferruginea, whose populations are numerous on coastal protection structures of sou...

Urban growth in coastal areas is leading to the introduction of multiple artificial structures into the marine environment. These structures differ from natural hard substrates in composition, age, complexity, inclination and even colour. Such factors affect the establishment and development of benthic communities and it is mostly agreed that thes...

Artificial structures have become to dominate shorelines worldwide. Under this framework, increasing our understanding of the ecological functioning of marine habitats incorporating a more holistic and ecosystem-based approach is crucial for preserving biodiversity. The present study aims to explore and compare for first time the main functional pa...

The effectiveness of monitoring programs in the marine environment is often limited by the scarcity of information concerning medium/long-term time series observations (years-decades) in complex and variable systems. Marine submerged caves, in particular, have received relatively low research effort, as they are confined and difficult to access eco...

Limpets are one of the most important herbivorous grazers of temperate rocky shores, promoting diversity and influencing the structure and functioning of intertidal communities. In the current context of global change, harvesting pressures on accessible intertidal and habitat modifications caused by coastal urbanization are threatening these organi...

The non-indigenous brown algae Rugulopteryx okamurae (Dictyotales, Ochrophyta) has expanded since year 2015 on lit hard-bottoms of the Strait of Gibraltar. It has produced serious impacts over the indigenous benthic communities, frequent hooks on fishing nets and lines and the accumulation of thousands of tons of seaweed in nearby beaches and wrack...

Submarine caves are considered priority habitats according to the Barcelona Convention and the EU Habitat Directive, yet they have received relatively low research effort when compared to other Mediterranean coastal habitats. This paper provides information about the long-term spatio-temporal observations of sessile benthos along the exterior-inter...

The Strait of Gibraltar is considered as a vulnerable biodiversity ‘hot spot’. In the marine area of Jbel Moussa, between Belyounech Bay and Tanger-Med harbour, an important shallow population of the red coral (Corallium rubrum) was reported in 2014. In 2015, 9 monitoring stations were placed within 3 sites to assess the degree of variation of the...

El mar Mediterráneo es conocido como ¨hot spot¨ por su biodiversidad marina, y en concreto en el estrecho de Gibraltar se concentran un gran número de especies marinas al converger tres regiones biogeográficas: Lusitana, Mauritana y Mediterránea. Este hecho origina que en esta área haya un gran número de especies endémicas y protegidas. Una de esta...

La Lapa ferrugínea (Patella ferruginea) es una especie incluida en el Catálogo Español de Especies Amenazadas (Ley 42/2007) con la categoría de “en peligro de extinción". Con la finalidad de promover e impulsar las acciones necesarias para eliminar el peligro de extinción al que se enfrenta la especie, el 30 de mayo de 2008 se aprueba la Estrategia...

RESUMEN Patella ferruginea es el invertebrado marino endémico del Mediterráneo occidental más amenazado según la Directiva 92/43 / CEE del Consejo Europeo y está considerado en "peligro de extinción" en el Catálogo Español de Especies Amenazadas. En el presente estudio se recoge la información actualmente disponible sobre los estudios de distribuci...