Biodiversity is widely acknowledged as a fundamental provider of ecosystem services, influencing productivity, nutrient cycling, resilience and resistance to disturbances. Conversely, climate change has emerged as a significant force shaping biodiversity by affecting individual life histories. The impacts of climate change, such as rising temperatures, acidification, and sea level rise, drive physiological, demographic, and community-scale processes by causing shifts in the distribution and functioning of key species. During the Mediterranean hot seasons, intertidal organisms living on the edge between high and low tidal marks, are often subjected to significant environmental fluctuations. These fluctuations affect individual body temperatures, leading to short term (acclimation, phenotypic plasticity) or long term (adaptation, selection, changes in distribution) responses. The Mediterranean mussel, Mytilus galloprovincialis (Lamarck, 1819), represents a key and valuable species in marine ecosystems and an important bioindicator for environmental changes. These mussels have been extensively used as model organisms for physiological, genetic and ecological studies. They are included in the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, Descriptor 9, EU 2008), and are recognised as useful site-specific bio-indicators to meet the EU Good Environmental Status (GES). In this study, individual performances were investigated in terms of specific thermal tolerance to frame the effect of temperature on metabolic machinery functioning. Once sampled, M. galloprovincialis specimens were subjected to 14 different temperatures, ranging from 8°C to 34°C, with respiration rates measured as a proxy for metabolism. The results revealed a left-skewed curve, with a Topt at 26.7 °C, classifying M. galloprovincialis as a thermo-tolerant species well-adapted to warmer waters. This may explain its global expanding range in response to rising temperatures. Understanding the thermal tolerance mechanisms of this species is essential for predicting the impact of climate change on marine biodiversity and for developing conservation strategies.

Games, due to their inherent propensity, combine knowledge to discern patterns, making them extremely useful for science education. Ecology, the science of patterns’ recognition, has significant potential for gamification. Within this framework, we developed the game “Tracce nel Mare – Ecosistemi da Salvare” wherein ecological principles are translated into game mechanics. This approach aims to significantly enhance students’ comprehension of marine ecological patterns. The primary ecological concepts incorporated into the game were: 1) habitat fragmentation, encompassing both the identification and understanding of the various factors driving fragmentation and its potential impacts on ecological patterns; 2) the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning; 3) the provision of ecosystem services linked to the functions of key habitat-forming species. The game begins with a “Puzzle Duel,” designed to familiarize players with the target habitats: Posidonia oceanica meadows, vermetid reefs and coralline algae beds. Elements for success in ecology, such as exploration (i.e., monitoring) and information synthesis, have been integrated into the game’s five challenges (i.e., boxes). These include: “Question Points”, designed to stimulate the creation of a knowledge baseline on the target habitats; “Ecological Memory”, aimed at memorizing habitat threats and the ecosystem services associated with healthy habitats; “Carbon Challenge”, to facilitate learning about carbon cycling in coralline algae; “Vermetid Craft”, to explore the functioning and services provided by reef-forming species. The game set contains a “master” box for teachers to guide the adventure, along with five challenge boxes. Each box is equipped with materials for two teams (2-10 players). The game has been donated to four Sicilian Marine Protected Areas (https://eeb.unipa.it/tracce-nel-mare/), to a local library/community centre and to the eco-museum in Palermo, and to an aquarium in Malta. The game was developed as a scale-up action of a capitalisation project Interreg VI-A Italy-Malta “CapSenHAR”, co-financed by the European Union’s, Regional Development Fund.

Biological interactions are one of the main factors influencing the distribution and abundance of species worldwide. Seagrasses represent important shallow-water habitats all around the world and provide crucial ecosystem goods and services to humans. Thanks to their structural complexity, they support heterogeneous populations and interact with associated benthic invertebrates (e.g., sea anemones, isopods, gastropods) and fish populations, with which they establish complex relationships that influence the performance and fitness of the involved organisms. Here, a systematic review was performed to investigate the existing potential biotic interactions between seagrasses and epibionts-epiphytes on a global scale. A complex search string was created and ran in the online databases Scopus and WoS, yielding a total of 43 final outcomes in a temporal range between 1987 and 2024. Results showed pro and cons of different types of biotic interactions (mainly symbiosis, including mutualism and commensalism) among these habitat formers and the associated epibionts and epiphytes. The review revealed that the most studied interactions referred to Posidonia oceanica (Delile) L. and Zostera marina L. providing refuge and habitat to different epiphytes and epibionts. Reviewed studies also highlighted the importance of epiphytes, their potential role in the growth, nutrient dynamics and their implications in the light absorption for seagrasses. Also, epibionts such as sea anemones may chemically defended seagrasses from predation, therefore their mucous can coat seagrass leaves and obstruct sunlight absorption. Understanding the various types of biotic interactions and studying how they can influence the performance of the species involved is of vital importance in the current and future context of climate change.

Climate changes are increasingly affecting marine ecosystem having general negative effect on their functioning, stability and potentially their resilience against multiple stressors. In this context, analysing decomposition rate in different ecosystems represent an important step to be studied to assess changes in nutrient cycling and carbon dynamic that may play a crucial role on ecosystem multifunctionality i.e. referring to the ability of an ecosystem to sustain multiple function and services simultaneously. Despite the importance of decomposition rate, global climate predictions continue to be hindered by limited data due to the high costs and efforts associated with comparative litter decomposition studies. Here we took advantage of the tea bags decomposition index (TBI) to study pattern of decomposition rate in a lagoon of the Stagnone di Marsala, Western Sicily, by deploying tea bags following a density gradient of seagrass. A seagrass ecosystem has been selected as target testing marine ecosystem as pivotal in services such habitat forming or carbon sequestration and being of the ecosystems facing challenges from climate change and anthropogenic pressures. TBI represents an innovative and cost-effective techniques based on a well standardized curve of decomposition and stabilization rate of two commercially available teas. This represents a cost-effective method allowing for an increased replication in field experiments and, more importantly, the standardized nature of TBI facilitates comparable data collection across different ecosystems. Additionally, due to its high accessibility, the methodology is suitable for sharing with the public and for large-scale application also in citizen science context. Involving the public in this kind of experiments could lead to an increase in data across multiple ecosystems, allowing for more useful replications to enhance comparisons between different ecosystems and achieve more robust results. In this context, TBI represent a salient tool to strength the science-stakeholders interface and facilitate the translational ecology.

Trawling on continental shelves disrupts benthic communities by altering sediments and increasing species mortality, favoring opportunistic over ecologically crucial long-lived species. An ecosystem-based approach, particularly trait-based analysis, is essential for understanding trawling’s broader impacts on community functioning, especially in areas like the Mediterranean’s Strait of Sicily, where extensive trawling necessitates multi-year management plans to prevent overexploitation. The study focused on an area between Malta and Sicily, known for significant trawling on sand and muddy sediments. Fishing intensity, assessed using satellite data, showed a gradient from coastline to offshore, peaking along the eastern continental shelf margin. Swept area ratio values ranged from 0.36 to 37.37, indicating substantial trawling pressure. Depth increased while fishing intensity decreased towards lower latitudes. During experimental trawl surveys, 8,191 individuals from 103 species were collected, with demersal species comprising 70%. Multivariate analysis assessed the impact of fishing intensity and environmental predictors on species and trait composition, revealing demersal species densities negatively affected by fishing intensity but positively correlated with bottom temperature. Benthic species densities showed weak negative impacts from fishing intensity but positive associations with temperature and chlorophyll concentration. Taxonomic diversity remained unaffected by fishing intensity, though chlorophyll concentration negatively affected demersal indices while enhancing benthic richness and diversity. Functional diversity indices showed no significant variation due to fishing intensity. Multivariate analysis indicated that spatial coordinates and studied variables explained only a small portion of taxonomic and functional composition variance. The study found minimal differences in bento-demersal assemblage composition along the observed fishing intensity gradient across the eastern Strait of Sicily’s continental shelf. The assemblage composition appears influenced by chronic bottom trawling and bathymetric factors. These findings underscore the complexity of managing trawling impacts in ecologically sensitive marine environments.

Biodiversity plays a crucial role in maintaining ecosystem functioning and ensuring the provision of ecosystem services that support human well-being, since the potential ecosystem functions in an ecosystem are a function of the diversity within it. In the marine environment, diverse species in different measure contribute to essential processes such as primary production, nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration and others, due their traits and main ecological attributes. However, biodiversity is increasingly threatened by anthropogenic stressors and climate change, leading to significant alterations in species composition and ecosystem dynamics. Seagrass meadows play a crucial role in coastal ecosystems, they enhance biodiversity in the areas where they are present by influencing the productivity, carbon cycling, filtration, food webs and other functions that make them great source of ecosystem services. The capacity of the seagrass to provide shelter and food is related to its architecture, which apart from being a direct measure of the state of the meadow, drives the secondary production, affecting the consumption and predation of organisms associated and, therefore, shaping its associated biodiversity. Seagrass structural complexity is then strictly connected with most of the ecological interactions, the structure of the community and the number of functions expressed by the underlying community. Here we present the results of our research where biodiversity is studied in a gradient of habitat structural complexity (shoot density; based on the hypothesis in which: higher complexity = higher biodiversity) to investigate its relationship to some indicators of ecosystem functions such as habitat provision, sediment stabilization and carbon sequestration. These results represent an important step in understanding the underlying mechanisms that drive ecosystem functioning, which then can be used to inform decisionmakers about the relevance of biodiversity when prioritizing conservation actions.