Sergio Rossi

Sergio Rossi
University of Salento | Unisalento · Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies (DiSTeBA)

PhD
Networking and starting the coordination of a large-scale marine restoration project

About

300
Publications
125,120
Reads
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7,775
Citations
Introduction
I am a research scientist specialized in marine natural resources and biological oceanography, focusing my attention in the health indicators of coastal benthic suspension feeder populations, flows of matter and energy in the benthic-pelagic coupling, the animal forests as carbon sinks, and the management and conservation of benthic marine wildlife. I have been working in the animal forests of warm temperate, polar, tropical and cold temperate seas.
Additional affiliations
October 2015 - present
Federal University of Ceará
Position
  • Professor
December 2016 - present
University of Salento
Position
  • Professor
July 2015 - present
Autonomous University of Barcelona
Position
  • Senior Researcher

Publications

Publications (300)
Chapter
Marine ecosystems continue to be transformed by human activities. Among them, benthic ecosystems are perhaps one of the most affected, because of bottom trawling, urban or agricultural development, climate change, and other stressors. Benthic communities that are dominated by structuring species, the marine animal forests (MAF), are among the most...
Article
Full-text available
Benthic-pelagic coupling processes and the quantity of carbon transferred from the water column to the benthic suspension feeders needs multiple intensive sampling approaches where several environmental variables and benthos performance are quantified. Here, activity, dietary composition, and capture rates of three Mediterranean gorgonians (Paramur...
Article
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The burning of fossil fuels is an unsustainable activity, which is leading to an increase in greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions and related global warming. Among sustainable energy sources, microalgae represent a promising alternative to fossil fuel and contribute to the achievement of important Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In particular, t...
Article
Full-text available
Short-time cycles of the water column can reflect undetectable changes in seasonal cycles, providing a high temporal resolution for quantifying seston availability. Here, trends in seston quantity and quality were investigated through intensive temporal cycle assessments at an IMTA site and a nearby fish farm facility (control site) during two diff...
Article
Not only advances but also old addictions, setbacks, obstructions and delays are observed during COP16 (on biodiversity), COP29 (on climate change) and G20 in a year full of tragedies resulting from climate change; we need to look in the rearview mirror and plan new paths to be presented and discussed at COP30, in 2025, in the Brazilian Amazon. Wor...
Article
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Aim Brazil harbours the largest known extent of rhodolith beds (RBs) in the world, a habitat whose ecological and economic importance have been widely overlooked. This creates a dire situation that is likely to worsen with the rapidly expanding human activities, considering that less than 5% of Brazil's ocean area is fully protected. We assessed th...
Article
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Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) has been demonstrated to be a very useful tool to minimize the waste product production of fish monocultures whilst promoting biomass that can be used for different purposes. The stable isotope analysis (δ 13 C, δ 15 N, and C:N ratio) of bioremediating organisms present in an IMTA facility is critical to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Short summary: The list of alien marine faunal species reported along the Apulian coasts until 2010 is updated with data resulting from numerous ad hoc samplings adding several new findings. 70 new species were added, especially among Polychaeta, Mollusca, Crustacea, Ascidiacea, while alien Bryozoa are recorded for the first time. Among the recorde...
Article
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Assessing how different users of a Marine Protected Area perceive environmental changes can contribute to design management strategies. We assess how locals and tourists perceive environmental changes in the Cap de Creus protected area (NW Mediterranean, Spain). To identify locally perceived changes, we first conducted semi-structured interviews wi...
Article
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The influence of benthic suspension feeders as bioremediating organisms on water column seston and their ability to mitigate fish farm waste was assessed by monthly analyses for one year. A monthly monitoring from July 2020 to October 2021 of physico-chemical and biochemical variables of the water column and the sediment was performed in an in-shor...
Article
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In recent years, population outbreaks of the annelid Hermodice carunculata (Polychaeta, Amphinomidae) are recurrently detected along the coastal zone of the Salento peninsula (Southern Italy), with impacts on marine benthic ecosystems. Annelida are renowned for their remarkable regeneration potential, enabling them to reform lost body parts. A hand...
Article
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Microplastics (MPs) are insidious plastic particles with sizes ranging from 1 to 5000 µm. Their presence has been reported all over the world. Recently, bioremediation to remove MPs from water columns using filter feeders as biofilters has been proposed. In a previous lab experiment , the MP bioremediation potential of four fouling organisms from a...
Article
Full-text available
Plastic pollution is a worldwide problem especially in the marine environment. Plastic items once fragmented into microplastics (MPs), can be captured by different marine species. Benthic filter feeders like sponges and polychaetas, due to their trophic strategy, are highly exposed to MPs pollution. Herein a simple but effective method to digest th...
Preprint
Full-text available
In recent years, population outbreaks of the annelid Hermodice carunculata (Polychaeta, Amphinomidae) are recurrently detected along the coastal zone of the Salento peninsula (Southern Italy), with impacts on marine benthic ecosystems. Annelida are renowned for their remarkable regeneration potential, enabling them to reform lost body parts by asex...
Article
Marine animal forests (MAFs) are benthic ecosystems characterised by biogenic three-dimensional structures formed by suspension feeders such as corals, gorgonians, sponges and bivalves. They comprise highly diversified communities among the most productive in the world's oceans. However, MAFs are in decline due to global and local stressors that th...
Article
Full-text available
Suitable colonization materials are a pursued target in marine restoration programs. Known for making nutrients available while reducing pollutants and the risk of pathogens in terrestrial ecosystems, Biochar and Bioferment materials of organic origin were tested during a two-year experiment. We tested the efficacy of these materials for restoratio...
Article
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Bottom trawling can significantly affect benthic communities, directly through immediate removal of sessile organisms and indirectly through sediment resuspension. Submarine canyons, often surrounded by fishing grounds, are important habitats for cold-water corals (CWC). Vulnerability of CWCs to increased suspended sediment concentration (SSC) is k...
Article
Coral reefs in turbid waters have been hypothesized to be a refuge from climate change. These naturally occurring communities were brought into the spotlight because some of their species exhibited record levels of resistance to marine heatwaves (MHWs) by disturbance-tolerant corals. However, there is a lack of data, as long-term monitoring, of the...
Article
Full-text available
Os recifes artificiais (ARs) podem restaurar ecossistemas de recifes degradados quando implementados adequadamente. Apesar do interesse crescente, existe controvérsia devido aos variados impactos associados a essas estruturas. Cada local em todo o mundo possui leis e regulamentos exclusivos relativos à implementação de AR. Neste artigo, avaliamos c...
Article
Full-text available
As mudanças no uso e cobertura da terra e a verificação do cumprimento da legislação em relação às áreas de preservação permanente (APP) são importantes para a gestão dos recursos hídricos, visto que as atividades antrópicas nas bacias hidrográficas provocam impactos na qualidade e disponibilidade dos recursos hídricos. Por isto foram identificadas...
Article
Full-text available
A dual nutrition mode (i.e., mixotrophy) can be advantageous for alien species in a new environment. In Cearà (Brazil), the symbiotic jellyfish Cassiopea andromeda is rapidly spreading under diverse environmental conditions across natural and human-altered coastal habitats, such as mangroves and shrimp farms. Here we report on the trophic ecology o...
Article
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Over the past decade, there has been increasing interest in marine restoration, requiring a consideration of various approaches for optimal success. Artificial reefs (ARs) have been employed for marine restoration and fisheries management, but their effectiveness in restoring ecosystems lacks well-defined ecological criteria and empirical evidence....
Article
Full-text available
Cold-water coral (CWC) reefs of the Angolan margin (SE Atlantic) are dominated by Desmophyllum pertusum and support a diverse community of associated fauna, despite hypoxic conditions. In this study, we use carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses (δ13C and δ15N) to decipher the trophic network of this relatively unknown CWC province. Although f...
Article
Full-text available
Microplastic pollution constitutes a serious environmental problem that requires more effective scientific research to describe its potential impacts on marine fauna. The interaction between microplastics and marine biota can have significant negative effects through the trophic chain, up to human health. To date, several steps forward have been ma...
Chapter
During the last decades, it has been possible to demonstrate that the mangrove ecosystem is one of the planet’s most biodiverse and socioeconomic-relevant environments of the world. The present chapter focused on the economic, cultural, and social structures of the coastal towns and villages of the intertropical zone of northern and northeastern Br...
Article
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Tropical reefs can occur naturally under suboptimal environmental conditions, where few reef-building corals thrive. These unique reefs are especially important for understanding resistance to global warming, but they are understudied. We studied a coral bleaching event that occurred in turbid reefs (~ 19 m deep) in the equatorial southwestern Atla...
Article
Full-text available
Seascape mapping is critical to understanding ecosystem services and managing areas with potential for fishing, power generation, mining, and tourism. Despite advances in marine geophysics, the necessary equipment to make underwater cartography can be expensive and requires a certain degree of specialization. In areas with scarce data, ethnomapping...
Article
Full-text available
Knowledge of the reproductive strategy is a key prerequisite to predict population dynamics and potential invasiveness of both native and non-indigenous outbreak-forming species. In 2014 the Lessepsian upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea andromeda reached the harbor of Palermo (NW Sicily, Thyrrenian Sea), to date its established westernmost outpost in...
Article
Microplastics (MPs) are a serious threat to the marine environment affecting ecosystem functioning and biodiversity. There is a vast literature about the uptake of MPs at different trophic levels, mainly focused on ecotoxicological effects in commercially relevant species. Little is still known about possible strategies to face MP pollution. Biorem...
Article
Despite global needs regarding the mitigation of the climatic and biodiversity crisis, Brazilian federal government signalized the bidding of 92 blocks of oil and gas exploitation. The potential production in these marine areas will add to the pre-salt reserves already contracted, multiplying by eight the Brazilian annual fossil fuel emissions by 2...
Book
In recent years it has been stressed that the problems created by population growth and climate change are so big and of such complexity that we do not have the capacity to address them. We do not react to a cascade of situations that are driving us to absolute collapse for two reasons: (1) The mental short-termism that is inherent in any anima...
Chapter
It is not surprising that we are interested in plastics as one of the most prominent polluting agents of the twenty-first century. We have gone from producing less than 10 million tons in the 1960s to more than 300 million in the 2010s. That plastic has had time to distribute itself, fragment and enter food chains of the oceans. Studies related to...
Article
Full-text available
The effect of severe drought on the functional groups that sustain the base of the mangrove food webs in semi-arid areas is largely unknown. We therefore analyzed the intra-annual variation in the assemblages and functional groups of copepods in a shallow, low-inflow estuary of the Brazilian semi-arid coast when the most severe drought ever occurre...
Article
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The term Marine Animal Forest (MAF) was first described by Alfred Russel Wallace in his book “The Malay Archipelago” in 1869. The term was much later re-introduced and various descriptions of MAFs were presented in great detail as part of a book series. The international research and conservation communities have advocated for the future protection...
Chapter
The acceleration of the processes of biodiversity loss and complexity has gone too far, putting ourselves as a species in a crossroads. We now understand that it is not enough to conserve, we need to regenerate. That regeneration goes through two different paradigm changes. The first takes into account upscaling plans. That concept is based on the...
Chapter
It is difficult to make a synthesis of the new trends in the so-called Blue Growth. This chapter opens a small window with some examples that can serve to understand a little bit the trends of some (not all) sectors that are in full expansion all over the world simultaneously, with their pros and cons. There is a need to change the rules of the gam...
Chapter
The impacts of industrial fishing have been present in the oceans for over one hundred years, but the exponential increase all over the world and the systematic exploitation of different areas started after world war II. The phenomenon of fishing has to be understood in order to understand the changes in the oceans, and such deep transformation is...
Chapter
Climate change, rigorously heralded more than thirty years ago as a real threat, has become the most pressing and pernicious global problem for the entire planet. In conjunction with local impacts such as fishing, eutrophication or the invasion of alien species, to give just a few examples, the acidification of the oceans and the warming of the sea...
Chapter
An important part of the health of the oceans depends on a good balance of the biogeochemical cycles. Both climate change (in its broadest sense, from the warming of the oceans to acidification) and the introduction of excess nutrients or heavy metals have caused, in many places, distortions in the balances between chemical elements, organisms and...
Chapter
Following the previous chapter about ecosystem conservation and restoration, we also need to strengthen the monitoring of climate change and biodiversity with the help of a plan that involves people outside the academic context. Citizen science has been shown to be a very good tool for providing useful data for scientists, if well directed. For exa...
Article
Full-text available
Large gaps in reef distribution may hinder the dispersal of marine organisms, interrupting processes vital to the maintenance of biodiversity. Here we show the presence and location of extensive reef habitats on the continental shelf between the Amazon Reef System (ARS) and the Eastern Brazilian Reef System (ERS), two reef complexes off eastern Sou...
Article
Coccolithophores are a calcifying unicellular phytoplankton group that are at the base of the marine food web, and their lipid content provides a source of energy to consumers. Coccolithophores are vulnerable to ocean acidification and warming, therefore it is critical to establish the effects of climate change on these significant marine primary p...
Article
Full-text available
Direct human pressure on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) adds to climate change impacts on marine habitats, especially in coastal biodiversity hot spots. Understanding MPA user perception towards the Coastal marine Habitats (CMHs) could improve awareness of the challenges that such areas have to face, eventually providing insights for the design of c...
Article
The ocean transformation due to the direct or indirect human influence is a fact. One of the most affected ecosystems are the benthic ones, where bottom trawling, urban/ agricultural development and climate change (among other things) deeply transform the bottom communities. Among these threatened communities, the marine forest is the most complex....
Article
Full-text available
Are the oceans dying? This is a question that many people are asking themselves more and more insistently. The answer is that in no case are they dying – but they are being transformed. Deeply. Unfortunately, this transformation has changed the ocean for a worst stage in terms of overall quality. Human-induced changes across the globe affect marine...
Article
Full-text available
The ocean transformation due to the direct or indirect human influence is a fact. One of the most affected ecosystems are the benthic ones, where bottom trawling, urban/agricultural development and climate change (among other things) deeply transform the bottom communities. Among these threatened communities, the marine forest is the most extended....
Article
Full-text available
The amphipod Gondogeneia antarctica is among the most abundant benthic organisms, and a key food web species along the rapidly warming West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). However, little is known about its trophic strategy for dealing with the extreme seasonality of Antarctic marine primary production. This study, using trophic markers, for the first t...
Article
Full-text available
The survival, behavior and competence period of lecithotrophic larvae depends not only on the energy allocation transferred by maternal colonies but also on the amount of energy consumed to sustain embryonic, larval, and post-larval development. The objective of the present work is to understand the effect of energy consumption on the performance o...
Article
Full-text available
The ecological physiology of anthozoans, as well as their resistance to stressors, are strongly influenced by environmental factors and the availability of resources. The energy budget of anthozoans can vary seasonally in order to find an equilibrium between the available resources and respiration, polyp activity, growth, and reproduction processes...
Article
Over the last few years, different digestion protocols have been proposed to extract microplastics from mussels, an important product from aquaculture and a relevant economic resource, always scrutinized as a potential pollutant concentrator. In this study, a full factorial experimental design technique has been employed to achieve efficiency in re...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the impacts on the Brazilian semi-arid coast, which is a drought-prone area (>1000 km) in the tropical Atlantic, and how ecosystems survive and adapt to such extreme environments requires socioecological studies to create a theory for conservation. Here, we highlight five main ongoing changes in tropical semi-arid areas, namely (1) th...
Article
Full-text available
The peculiar shallow-water reefs of the Tropical Southwestern Atlantic Ocean have thrived in conditions considered suboptimal (e.g., moderate turbidity, higher level of nutrients, and resuspension of sediments) under the optics of classical coral reefs. Recently, these marginal reefs have been hypothesized to provide climate-change refugia from nat...
Article
Full-text available
The aims of the present paper were to review the knowledge about the Mediterranean non-indigenous species of the taxa Cnidaria and Ctenophora (CC NIS), to screen the risk of 98 species for their potential invasiveness in the Mediterranean Sea and their approach to the Italian waters. Of these, 38% are well established in the basin, 4% are known for...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, the different possibilities and innovations related to sustainable aquaculture in the Mediterranean area are discussed, while different maricultural methods, and the role of Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) in supporting the exploitation of the ocean’s resources, are also reviewed. IMTA, and mariculture in general, when ca...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological profiling of non-native species is essential to predict their dispersal and invasiveness potential across different areas of the world. Cassiopea is a monophyletic taxonomic group of scyphozoan mixotrophic jellyfish including C. andromeda, a recent colonizer of sheltered, shallow-water habitats of the Mediterranean Sea, such as harbors a...
Article
Full-text available
Marine animal forests are benthic communities dominated by sessile suspension feeders (such as sponges, corals, and bivalves) able to generate three-dimensional (3D) frameworks with high structural complexity. The biodiversity and functioning of marine animal forests are strictly related to their 3D complexity. The present paper aims at providing n...
Chapter
Marine ecosystems continue to be transformed by human activities. Among them, benthic ecosystems are perhaps one of the most affected, because of bottom trawling, urban or agricultural development, climate change, and other stressors. Benthic communities that are dominated by structuring species, the marine animal forests (MAF), are among the most...
Chapter
Full-text available
Despite covering only 0.82% of the ocean’s surface, the Mediterranean Sea supports up to 18% of all known marine species, with 21% being listed as vulnerable and 11% as endangered. The acceler- ated spread of tropical non-indigenous species is leading to the “tropicalization” of Mediterranean fauna and flora as a result of warming and extreme heat...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Mediterranean Ecosystem report on Climate and Global changes. Balzan MV, Hassoun AER, Aroua N, Baldy V, Bou Dagher M, Branquinho C, Dutay J-C, El Bour M, Médail F, Mojtahid M, Morán-Ordóñez A, Roggero PP, Rossi Heras S, Schatz B, Vogiatzakis IN, Zaimes GN, Ziveri P 2020 Ecosystems. In: Climate and Environmental Change in the Mediterranean Basin –...
Chapter
Full-text available
Marine ecosystems: Despite covering only 0.82% of the ocean’s surface, the Mediterranean Sea supports up to 18% of all known marine species, with 21% being listed as vulnerable and 11% as endangered. The accelerated spread of tropical non-indigenous species is leading to the “tropicalization” of Mediterranean fauna and flora as a result of warming...
Article
Full-text available
Quantitative assessment of planktonic organisms is a key issue in understanding biodiversity, biomass, and carbon fluxes in marine ecosystems during the ongoing Anthropocene. However, the implications of the choice of plankton sampling equipment in tropical marine ecosystems have not been fully addressed. The goal of this study was to investigate t...
Article
Full-text available
This article seeks to present a synthetic summary of knowledge and thus improve awareness of microplastic impacts on corals. Recent research suggests that microplastics have a variety of species-specific impacts. Among them, a reduced growth, a substantial decrease of detoxifying and immunity enzymes, an increase in antioxidant enzyme activity, hig...
Article
Full-text available
Invasive species are one of the biggest threats to coastal areas. Jellyfish, when found in aquaculture systems, may cause major economic damage; they are already present in many aquaculture facilities in the Mediterranean, Yellow Sea, and Bohai Sea. Herein, for the first time, we describe the occurrence of the upside-down jellyfish (genus Cassiopea...