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January 2006 - October 2014
Publications
Publications (111)
Bivalve traceability is a major concern. It is of utmost importance to develop tools that allow providing important information to the consumer, not only on the origin of the product but also on its sustainability and safety, due to the harvest restrictions imposed by regulatory entities. This study evaluated the application of computer vision mach...
Water pollution is one of the pressing issues of the world that needs to be resolved. It must be properly monitored in order to address issues efficiently and to prevent it from negatively affecting the aquatic ecosystem and its surroundings. As such, this study proposes a Mamdani fuzzy-based system and ANFIS for chemical contamination level classi...
Anthropogenic chemical contamination represents a key stressor of natural environments with pharmaceuticals comprising a particular group of emerging pollutants with the potential to induce biological responses in non-target organisms. Therefore, an analytical method based on ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to time-of-flight ta...
Seafood traceability is a matter of concern for producers and consumers, providing insights that can simultaneously inform the consumers on the origin of the product, nutritional value and safety while adding market value to the products. Edible seaweed harvest has been pointed out as an environmentally friendly sustainable food production solution...
Top predators such as most shark species are extremely vulnerable to amassing high concentrations of contaminants, but not much is known about the effects that the contaminant body burden imparts on these animals. Species like the blue shark (Prionace glauca) are very relevant in this regard, as they have high ecological and socioeconomic value, an...
The high demand and economic relevance of cephalopods make them prone to food fraud, including related to harvest location. Therefore, there is a growing need to develop tools to unequivocally confirm their capture location. Cephalopod beaks are non-edible, making this material ideal for traceability studies as it can also be removed without loss o...
Contamination of surface waters by pharmaceuticals is an emerging problem globally. This is because the increased access and use of pharmaceuticals by a growing world population lead to environmental contamination, threatening non-target species in their natural environment. Of particular concern are neuroactive pharmaceuticals, which are known to...
Food fraud associated with intentional mislabelling of non-Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) is a concern for consumers. “Maçã de Alcobaça” (Alcobaça apple) is one of the oldest Portuguese PGI products, characteristic of the main apple-growing regions in the country, being of utmost importance to develop traceability and authenticity tools to...
Effects assessed at higher levels of biological organization (populations and communities) are the consequence of the sum of effects on individuals, which usually result from impacts at cellular and molecular levels. Given this rationale, these lower levels of biological organization are more responsive at an early stage, making them potential reso...
The increased use of anti-depressants along with their increased occurrence in aquatic environments is of concern for marine organisms. Although these pharmaceutical compounds have been shown to negatively affect marine diatoms, their mode of action in these non-target, single-cell phototrophic organisms is yet unknown. Using a Fourier-transform io...
Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate (SDS) is an anionic surfactant, extensively used in detergents, household and personal care products, as well as in industrial processes. The present study aimed to disclose the potential toxicological effects of SDS exposure under environmentally relevant concentrations (0, 0.1, 1, 3, and 10 mg L−1) on the physiology and bio...
Portugal mainland and Atlantic archipelagos (Madeira and Azores) provide a wide array of coastal ecosystems with varying typology and degrees of human pressure, which shape the microbial communities thriving in these habitats, leading to the development of microbial resistance traits. The samples collected on the Portuguese northeast Atlantic coast...
This report summarizes current threats to the Tagus estuary and adjacent ecosystems, presented in Lisbon in June 2021, and prioritizes actions to maintain or improve ecosystem services for a densely populated area close to the deep ocean.
Provenance and traceability are key aspects of seafood safety, supporting managers, and regula-tors, and allowing consumers to have clear information about the origin of the seafood products they consume. In the present study, we developed an innovative spectral approach based on total reflection X-ray fluorescence (TXRF) spectroscopy to identify t...
In the context of expanding fish production and complex distribution chains, traceability, provenance and food safety tools are becoming increasingly important. Here, we compare the elemental fingerprints of gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) muscle from the wild and different aquaculture productions (semi-intensive earth ponds; and intensive sea ca...
Emerging pollutants impose a high degree of stress on marine ecosystems, compromising valuable resources, the planet and human health. Pharmaceutical residues often reach marine ecosystems, and their input is directly related to human activities. Fluoxetine is an antidepressant, and one of the most prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors...
The global oxygen (O2) content in oceans is decreasing due to climatic changes since it is associated with temperature-driven declines in oxygen solubility, strengthened stratification of seawater masses, increased biological oxygen consumption and coastal eutrophication. More studies are required to focus onnocturnal hypoxia. The resilience of cor...
Sea urchin gonads are an economically valuable seafood item, considered a delicacy in many parts of the world. However, its consumption can either pose a food safety threat, as they accumulate potentially toxic elements from contaminated environments or promote the depletion of natural stocks due to the high demand. Knowing their harvesting locatio...
Present-day COVID-19 pandemic led to the increasing daily use of antimicrobials worldwide. Triclosan is a manmade disinfectant chemical used in several of consumer healthcare products, thus being frequently detected in surface waters. In the present work, we aimed to evaluate triclosan effect on diatom cell photophysiology, fatty acid profiles and...
The use of glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) worldwide has increased exponentially over the last two decades increasing the environmental risk to marine and coastal habitats. The present study investigated the effects of a GBH at environmentally relevant concentrations (0, 10, 50, 100, 250, and 500 μg L−1), on the physiology and biochemistry (photo...
Quinoa consumption has increased in worldwide importance due to an extraordinary nutritional value and public acceptance as alternative food. Fatty acid profiles of 10 quinoa varieties grown in the same geographical location were analyzed using different chemometric multivariate approaches [variable in importance partial least square discriminant a...
Marine coastal and transitional ecosystems are facing increasing impacts, and often reflect the most immediate effects of environmental change, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss. With over half of the population currently living in coastal areas, these areas are of interest for multiple uses and resources, as well as subjected to multiple...
Bioinvasions pose undeniable threats and trigger changes in salt marsh ecosystem functioning. In Mediterranean and Atlantic marshes, the invasion by S. patens contributed to added competitive pressure to native middle-upper marsh species such as H. portulacoides. The introduction of a new and aggressive non-indigenous species (NIS) is a game-change...
Estuaries have long been preferred areas of human settlement, where multiple anthropogenic activities take place, which have contributed to a significant decrease in environmental quality of these ecosystems. Accordingly, environmental monitoring and management have long relied on the development of tools that summarize and simplify complex informa...
Determining where harvested or produced seafood comes from is a pressing issue worldwide, with growing consumers’ demand for traceable and sustainable seafood products. Identifying fine-scale traceability markers is particularly important in the context of small-scale fisheries, which are prone to illegal harvesting and mislabelling and associated...
Contaminants, when present above certain thresholds, can induce physiological constraints to organisms, namely diatoms, a model group representative of marine phytoplankton, triggering feedback mechanisms, such as changes in cell’s fatty acid profiles, that can be used as biomarkers towards xenobiotic exposure. Having this in mind and considering t...
This chapter addresses the use of fish as indicators of environmental health. The main anthropogenic pressures impacting estuarine fishes are reviewed, as well as the main types of responses by fishes at different levels of biological organisation. Fishes have been widely used to assess estuarine health through different methodological approaches,...
In recent years, validation of seafood authenticity and provenance has attracted the attention of authorities and consumers. Increasing levels of food fraud has raised awareness regarding seafood traceability, especially in highly valuable and highly consumed seafood products, such as the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris). Seafood traceability stud...
The stalked barnacle Pollicipes pollicipes is an abundant species on the very exposed rocky shore habitats of the Spanish and Portuguese coasts, constituting also an important economical re-source, as a seafood item with high commercial value. Twenty-four elements were measured by untargeted Total Reflection X-ray Fluorescence spectroscopy (TXRF) i...
Recent global changes have contributed to water scarcity and land degradation, urging for the development of alternative solutions in agriculture. Halophytes biosaline agriculture has been viewed in the past decades as a potential alternative to traditional agriculture practices in degraded lands and salinized soils. Abandoned salt pans provide ide...
Bioinvasions pose undeniable threats and trigger changes in salt marsh ecosystem functioning. In Mediterranean and Atlantic marshes, the invasion by S. patens contributed to added competitive pressure to endemic middle-upper marsh species such as H. portulacoides . The introduction of a new and aggressive non-indigenous species (NIS) is a game-chan...
Marine macroalgae have been increasingly targeted as a source of bioactive compounds to be used in several areas, namely as biopesticides. When using invasive species, such as Asparagopsis armata, for this purpose, there is a two-folded opportunity by acquiring these biomolecules from a low-cost resource, while by harvesting it, one can control its...
Fish feeding management is one of the most crucial considerations in aquaculture production. The traditional feeding method such as table-based and scheduled automated feeding schemes are inaccurate. In contrast, the automated on-demand feeding system has reduced the inaccuracies of the older feeding schemes. However, existing on-demand systems hav...
Uptake of contaminants is linked to their toxicity and is usually estimated through their lipophilicity (logKow). Here, we review current literature regarding bioconcentration, i.e. uptake of contaminants from the external environment only, and the effects of exposure to neuroactive pharmaceuticals in fish. We aim to determine if lipophilicity is a...
Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) and milkfish (Chanos chanos) are the highly consumed and the most commercially important fishes in the Philippines. Due to the industrialization of the country, numerous natural sites intended for rearing these fishes are affected by environmental emissions on top of climate change and the possibility of having an ef...
Nitrate concentration contained in the aquaponic water has a crucial effect that influences the growth of lettuce crops. However, most of the existing methods of testing its presence remain mostly destructive, expensive, utilize multiple sensors. To address this issue, a hybrid method of indirectly identifying the nitrate concentration present in a...
The verification of food authenticity and provenance is a complex task and has raised public concern in recent years due to multiple episodes of food fraud and potential risks to consumers. In this sense, the evaluation of multi-elemental signatures is increasingly applied to confirm and validate the site of origin of animal products. Yet, we lack...
Chlorophyll a induction curves, or Kautsky curves, have been extensively used to
study physiological stress conditions in phototrophic organisms, with the analysis of
several derived parameters. Nevertheless, these variables use only about 10 % of the
information comprised in the complete Kautsky curve dataset, leaving 90 % of the
photochemical dat...
Over recent decades, the world has experienced the adverse consequences of uncontrolled development of multiple human activities. In recent years, the total production of chemicals has been composed of environmentally harmful compounds, the majority of which have significant environmental impacts. These emerging contaminants (ECs) include a wide ra...
The invasion of natural communities by non-indigenous species represents one of the most serious threats to biodiversity. Understanding the ecophysiology of invasive species can provide insights into potential physiological handicaps relative to native species. By doing so, we can leverage the development of ecoengineering solutions for the removal...
Coastal areas host some of the planet’s most productive ecosystems, providing life-sustaining ecological services and several benefits to humankind, while also being some of the most threatened areas (e.g. by globalization, climate change, and biological invasion). Salt marshes are coastal habitats with a key role in food and shelter provisioning,...
On a global scale, marine transitional waters have been severely impacted by anthropogenic activities. Historically, developing human civilizations have often settled in coastal areas with about 2/3 of the human population inhabiting areas within 20 km range from coastal areas. Environmental management worldwide strives for sustainable development...
Transitional ecosystems are among the most degraded ecosystems worldwide, with several groups of organisms investigated for their reliability as biological indicators of human-driven disturbances. Recently non-traditional biochemical biomarkers such as an individual’s fatty acids profile have been identified as promising tools for assessing contami...
We screened for the presence of 66 different pharmaceutical residues in surface waters and
in multiple invertebrate and fish species of the Tejo estuary to produce an environmental risk
assessment of individual pharmaceuticals and their mixtures, as well as evaluate the bioaccumulation of pharmaceuticals in one of Europe’s largest estuarine systems...
Worldwide anthropogenic activities result in the production and release of potentially damaging toxic pollutants into ecosystems, thereby jeopardizing their health and continuity. Research stud-ies and biomonitoring programs attend to this emerging problematic by applying and developing statistically relevant indexes that integrate complex biomarke...
Worldwide anthropogenic activities result in the production and release of poten-tially damaging toxic pollutants into ecosystems, thereby jeopardizing their health and continuity. Research studies and biomonitoring programs attend to this emerging problematic by applying and developing statistically relevant indexes that integrate complex biomarke...
Herein, we demonstrate, for the first time, that covalent organic frameworks (COFs) can be efficient adsorbents for the screening of pharmaceuticals in real water samples, obtaining highly representative data on their occurrence and avoiding the cost of carrying high volume samples and tedious and costly clean-up and preconcentration steps. Of the...
Marine and coastal ecosystems are the ultimate sink of many contaminants from anthropogenic activities, such as trace elements. Although several ecotoxicological tests are available using autotrophic organisms, none focus on marine plants. Juncus acutus has already showed that it is a good candidate for ecotoxicological studies, providing a good se...
In recent years, the Antarctic territory has seen a rise in the number of tourists and scientists. This has led to an increase in the anthropogenic footprint in Antarctic ecosystems, namely in terms of emerging contaminants, such as Biocides, Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) as well as Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products (PPCPs). Yet scar...
The increasing number of pharmaceuticals in the environment and their difficult biodegradation, can lead to bioaccumulation in different trophic compartments. Their bioaccumulation can have negative consequences, especially in the generation of bacterial resistance by antibiotics, but also in the impairment of plant and animal metabolism. The Tejo...
The increasing uncontrolled development of human activities and consequent increase in the production and release into the marine realm of potentially harmful substances highlights the need to develop efficient and high-throughput screening (HTS) tools. Bio-optical tools, such as laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and pulse amplitude modulated (PAM)...
Present demographic trends suggest a rise in the contributions of human pharmaceuticals into coastal ecosystems, underpinning an increasing demand to evaluate the ecotoxicological effects and implications of drug residues in marine risk assessments. Propranolol, a non-selective β-adrenoceptor blocker, is used worldwide to treat high blood pressure...
Glyphosate is the main active component of the commercial formulation Roundup®, the most used chemical herbicide worldwide. However, its potential high toxicity to the environment and throughout trophic webs has come under increasing scrutiny. The present study aims to investigate the application of bio-optical techniques and its correlation with t...
Emerging pollutants such as pharmaceuticals are continuously released to aquatic environments posing a rising threat to marine ecosystems. Yet, monitoring routines and ecotoxicity data on biota worldwide for these substances are lacking. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are among the most prescribed and found pharmaceuticals in aquatic environ...
Salt marsh ecosystems are extremely impacted by human activities whilst also acting as sinks of contaminants such as heavy metals. Halophytic plant species can survive and thrive in estuarine and coastal areas with higher salt conditions that are generally not favourable to most plants. Halophyte distribution and abundance clearly relate to anthrop...
Pharmaceuticals are widespread contaminants across the aquatic systems and despite the role that these compounds play in society today, little is known about their effects in aquatic organisms once they are released into the environment. This study aims to provide quantitative insight on the effects of antidepressants on the reproduction of fish an...
Within the Tejo Estuary, non-indigenous species (NIS) Spartina patens colonizes the upper
middle marsh competing with the native Halimione portulacoides for space and resources. Due to the very different root system and metabolism between both species, this invasion can have significant biogeochemical implications, namely in terms of metal speciati...
Pharmaceutical residues impose a new and emerging threat to aquatic environments and its biota. One of the most commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals is the antidepressant fluoxetine, a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor that has been frequently detected, in concentrations up to 40 µg L-1, in aquatic ecosystems. The present study aims to investi...
Variations in otolith elemental composition are widely used to reconstruct fish movements. However, reconstructing habitat use and environmental histories of fishes within estuaries is still a major challenge due to the dynamic nature of these coastal environments. In this study, we performed a laboratory experiment to investigate the effects of va...
We characterized the transport pathways of pharmaceuticals released from wastewater outfalls in one of Europe's largest estuarine systems (Tagus estuary, Portugal), to identify areas of ecological relevance prone to environmental degradation due to increased exposure to these emerging contaminants. Particle source, Lagrangian trajectories and arriv...
Pharmaceutical compounds are continuously released into the aquatic environment, resulting in their ubiquitous presence in many estuarine and coastal systems. As pharmaceuticals are designed to produce effects at very low concentrations and target specific evolutionary conserved pathways, there are growing concerns over their potential deleterious...
