Neus Sanmartí

Neus Sanmartí
University of Barcelona | UB · Department of Ecology

About

30
Publications
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428
Citations
Introduction
My main research interest is understanding the functioning of benthic marine ecosystems dominated by primary producers. The main areas of my research are: 1) direct and indirect biological interactions and particularly facilitation, 2) the effects of environmental disturbances on such interactions, 3) the resilience of ecosystems to global and local change (increasing temperature, eutrophication, mechanical disturbances...), and 4) understanding the ecosystem stability and alternative stable states.

Publications

Publications (30)
Article
Full-text available
Grazing can impart long‐lasting changes in vegetated ecosystems. How ecosystems respond to herbivory depends on the ecological and evolutionary histories of their foundational species. The overall ecosystem functioning and associated biodiversity depend on these responses but there is still little understanding on how the intensity and duration of...
Article
Full-text available
Abiotic environmental conditions can significantly influence the way species interact. In particular, plant-herbivore interactions can be substantially dependent on temperature and nutrients. The overall product of these relationships is critical for the fate and stability of vegetated ecosystems like marine forests. The last few decades have seen...
Article
Full-text available
Changes in light and sediment conditions can sometimes trigger abrupt regime shifts in seagrass meadows resulting in dramatic and unexpected die-offs of seagrass. Light attenuates rapidly with depth, and in seagrass systems with non-linear behaviours, can serve as a sharp boundary beyond which the meadow transitions to bare sand. Determining system...
Article
Interactions among species are essential in shaping ecological communities, although it is not always clear under what conditions they can persist when the number of species involved is higher than two. Here we describe a three-species assemblage involving the seagrass Cymodocea nodosa, the pen shell Pinna nobilis and the herbivore sea urchin Parac...
Article
We studied the recovery of the fast-growing seagrass Cymodocea nodosa from disturbances of different intensities (shoots removal or the entire plant), plot sizes (from 0.04 to 1 m²) and in different seasons (spring and autumn) in a shallow coastal bay. We monitored recovery over 27 months and measured plant traits at the end. Shoot density and cano...
Article
Anthropogenic drivers and global warming are altering the occurrence of infectious marine diseases, some of which produce mass mortalities with considerable ecosystemic and economic costs. The Mediterranean Sea is considered a laboratory to examine global processes, and the fan mussel Pinna nobilis a sentinel species within it. Since September 2016...
Article
Coastal ecosystems, such as seagrasses, are subjected to local (e.g. eutrophication) and global (e.g. warming) stressors. While the separate effects of warming and eutrophication on seagrasses are relatively well known, their joint effects remain largely unstudied. In order to fill this gap, and using Cymodocea nodosa as a model species, we assesse...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological research, particularly in marine environments, tends to focus on single habitats and often single spatial scales, and thus not account for ecological processes operating at multiple spatial scales. Here we aim to explore how coastal fish assemblages are influenced by landscape patterns integrating multiple spatial scales, to assess the s...
Article
Facilitative interactions are important forces in shaping community structure and function, and understanding how they respond to environmental changes has become an increasing concern in ecology. Lucinid bivalves play a significant role in seagrass meadows, through a mutualism in which the seagrass provides habitat and oxygen via the roots, while t...
Article
Sexual reproduction in predominantly clonal marine plants increases recombination favoring adaptation and enhancing species resilience to environmental change. Recent studies of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica suggest that flowering intensity and frequency are correlated with warming events associated with global climate change, but these studies h...
Article
Full-text available
There is increasing uncertainty of how marine ecosystems will respond to rising temperatures. While studies have focused on the impacts of warming on individual species, knowledge of how species interactions are likely to respond is scant. The strength of even simple two-species interactions is influenced by several interacting mechanisms, each pot...
Presentation
Full-text available
Coastal ecosystems are among the most productive, yet highly threatened, systems in the world. They face an increasing number of multiple stressors whose combined effects could lead to multiple consequences. For instance, predicted temperature increases or heat waves occurrence could worsen eutrophication effects if they act synergistically. Seagra...
Presentation
Full-text available
The capacity of species to efficiently recover after disturbances is a key component of ecosystem resilience and may depend on several aspects including species features and disturbance characteristics. Seagrass meadows are key, yet threatened, habitats that are affected by both large and small-scale disturbances. In the present study we evaluated...
Article
Full-text available
Seagrasses form some of the most important coastal habitats. They may be negatively affected by trace metal contamination in certain coastal areas. In this study we experimentally assessed selected morphological and physiological traits of the seagrass Cymodocea nodosa, with increasing concentrations of copper (Cu) under controlled laboratory condi...
Research
Full-text available
The relevance of seagrass meadows in blue carbon storage is now widely acknowledged. However, the evaluation of global budgets has been assessed with limited knowledge on their sources of variability. This might weaken the accuracy of global estimates and leading to estimates not comprehensive enough. Carbon storage capacity depends, primarily, on...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The relevance of seagrass meadows in blue carbon storage is now widely acknowledged. However, the evaluation of global budgets has been assessed with limited knowledge on their sources of variability. This might weaken the accuracy of global estimates and leading to estimates not comprehensive enough. Carbon storage capacity depends, primarily, on...
Article
Herbivory causes both direct and indirect damage to plants, with negative consequences for plant performance and fitness. Plants have thus evolved strategies to counteract or mitigate such negative effects. The strategies used by aquatic plants to cope with herbivore pressure are of key importance to better understand ecological and evolutionary pr...
Presentation
Full-text available
Understanding the role of species interactions in structuring ecological communities is one of the challenges of present-day ecology. Positive or facilitative interactions have recently been considered as important mechanisms in shaping communities. Positive interactions may involve engineer species that modify or create habitat for others species,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Seagrass meadows sediments accumulate high quantities of organic matter, whose decomposition potentially leads to anoxic sediments and increase sulphide levels that are toxic to the plants. An effective mechanism to counteract the deleterious effects of sediment anoxia is the oxygen transport from leaves through the aerenchyma to be released throug...
Article
Most studies on plant decomposition in salt marshes have been carried out in Spartina-dominated marshes in North America. In contrast, few have focused on marshes in Mediterranean systems. Moreover, research into litter decay in estuarine systems has been conducted with plant material collected before natural senescence and death. Here we followed...
Article
Growth, senescence and decomposition rates of Scirpus maritimus were studied in a Mediterranean brackish wetland. Plant tussocks were tagged in March, 2002 and were totally dead by September, 2002. Decomposition rates were determined over 360 days using litter bag technique and mass loss, nutrient dynamics, fungal biomass, meiofauna and macroorgani...
Article
The spatial variability of plant organic matter processing was studied experimentally in a shallow coastal lagoon (Tancada lagoon, average depth: 37 cm, area: 1.8 km2) in the Ebro River Delta (NE Spain). To determine the effect of hydrology and sediment characteristics on plant organic matter processing, leaves of Phragmites australis at the end of...

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