Developing a novel system to monitor the status of coastal ecosystems in South West England: from remote sensing to marine predators

该博士项目旨在开发一个可靠而强大的监测系统，该系统将结合自下而上和自上而下的方法，提供有关英格兰西南部沿海海洋生态系统状况的全面信息，从而更好地近似于具有经济重要性的中等营养水平物种。该项目直接涉及资源的可持续管理，特别是远洋和底栖渔业，因为它将提供来自多种来源（遥感和顶级捕食者）的证据，这些证据将确定可能影响整个沿海海洋生态系统营养通量的压力源，而人为采掘活动对沿海海洋生态系统的影响更大。我们预计，我们的项目将提供有效的工具，支持监测活动，并有助于发现对管理资源有影响的区域异常情况（例如，初级生产力制度的转变、初级生产者群落组成的变化、有害藻华（HAB）事件、食物网营养环节的损失和变化等）。最终，该项目将增加我们可以从现成的样本中获得的生态相关信息的数量，这些样本可以以低成本轻松获得，对我们识别生态系统范围变化的能力产生积极影响，增强我们应对这些变化的能力，并改善我们的可持续管理策略。

This PhD Project aims at developing a reliable and robust monitoring system that will provide comprehensive information about the status of the coastal marine ecosystem off Southwest England, combining bottom-up and top-down approaches and consequently providing a better approximation to mid-trophic level species of economic importance. The project directly addresses the sustainable management of resources, particularly pelagic and demersal fisheries, as it will provide evidence from a combination of sources (remote sensing and top predators) that will identify stressors that can impact the trophic fluxes across the coastal marine ecosystem, where anthropogenic extractive activities have a larger impact. We anticipate that our project will render effective tools that will support monitoring activities and will help detect regional anomalies that have an impact on managed resources (e.g., shifts in the primary productivity regimes, changes in the community composition of primary producers, Harmful Algal Blooms (HAB) events, and losses and changes in the magnitude of trophic links in the food web, among others). Ultimately, this project will increase the amount of ecological-relevant information that we can obtain from readily available samples that can easily be obtained at low costs, positively impacting our ability to identify ecosystem-wide variations, enhancing our capacity to respond to these, and improving our sustainable management strategies.