Acronym: MedRhodo
Keywords: #RhodoliteBeds; #CarbonFluxes; #Conservation
Coordinator/Lead Partner: Genoa Marine Centre, SZN, Italy
Principal Investigator(s): Federica Ragazzola
Partnership: CCMAR
Funding body and amount: British Phycological Society, UK, https://brphycsoc.org/
Overall funding: 8000 £
Funding to GMC-SZN: 8000 £
Grant period: 1st March 2023 – 1st March 2024
Project in a nutshell:
With the current threat of climate change, the role of CO2 uptake and storage by marine ecosystems has become a hot topic of international research and policy, being targeted as a possible natural solution to slow down atmospheric CO2 rise. Through major research efforts, carbon pools and fluxes associated with coastal communities, such as mangroves, salt marshes and seagrasses, have been characterised. A controversial point, increasingly discussed in recent days from the standpoint of blue carbon climate change mitigation, is the potentially important role of ecosystems that are built by calcifiers, such as those formed by free-living coralline algae, the rhodolith beds. The overall aim of the project is to assess carbon storage capacity and present-day productivity and associated carbon fluxes of shallow rhodolith-bed communities in the Mediterranean.
Contacts: federica.ragazzola(at)szn.it