Seafloors are crucial to marine ecosystems for the functions and services they provide. Benthic organisms, vital to these ecosystems, are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Rising temperatures, ocean acidification, and shifting currents disrupt benthic species and communities, yet future related impact assessments remain limited. Here, we trained species distribution models with predictors from state of the art physica...

Aim Climate change affects dramatically biogenic habitats by altering the geographic distribution of the foundational species and the structure of landscapes they form. As a consequence, the associated biotic communities could experience habitat loss and fragmentation. In this paper, we assess how climate change impacts the geographic distribution of Mediterranean seagrass habitats and the cascading effects on the biodiversity...

Fucus virsoides is a brown seaweed endemic to the Adriatic and the only species of its genus found in the Mediterranean. Historically widespread from the Venice lagoon (Italy) to Albania, this species has suffered a sharp decline and is currently threatened with extinction. Over the past three decades, the northern Adriatic has seen a shift towards oligotrophy conditions, yet the ecophysiology of F. virsoides in response to nu...

Fucus virsoides is a glacial relict-species endemic to the Adriatic that was widespread from northern Italy to southern Albania. In recent decades, however, it has suffered an alarming decline. In this study, all available records were reviewed to reconstruct its historical and current occurrence and to investigate the possible causes of its decline. Comprehensive mapping revealed a continuing decline with a significant shift,...

Spatial fisheries management is widely used to reduce overfishing, rebuild stocks, and protect biodiversity. However, the effectiveness and optimization of spatial measures depend on accurately identifying ecologically meaningful areas, which can be difficult in mixed fisheries. To apply a method generally to a range of target species, we developed an ensemble of species distribution models (e‐SDM) that combines general additi...

The Mediterranean Forecasting System produces operational analyses and reanalyses and 10 d forecasts for many essential ocean variables (EOVs), from currents, temperature, salinity, and sea level to wind waves and pelagic biogeochemistry. The products are available at a horizontal resolution of 1/24∘ (approximately 4 km) and with 141 unevenly spaced vertical levels. The core of the Mediterranean Forecasting System is constitut...

The northern Adriatic Sea (NAS) hosts numerous biogenic subtidal reefs that are considered biodiversity hotspots. Several studies have already investigated the origin and biodiversity of these reefs. However, many of them are still unexplored and further knowledge is needed for their conservation. Here, the spatial variability, epibenthic community structure, and environmental features that characterize these habitats were inv...

Ocean acidification (OA) is a serious consequence of climate change with complex organism-to-ecosystem effects that have been observed through field observations but are mainly derived from experimental studies. Although OA trends and the resulting biological impacts are likely exacerbated in the semi-enclosed and highly populated Mediterranean Sea, some fundamental knowledge gaps still exist. These gaps are at tributed to bot...

Disentangling the effects of mixed fisheries and climate change across entire food-webs requires a description of ecosystems using tools that can quantify interactive effects as well as bio-economic aspects. A calibrated dynamic model for the Sicily Channel food web, made up of 72 functional groups and including 13 fleet segments, was developed. A temporal simulation until 2050 was conducted to evaluate the bio-economic intera...

We simulate and analyze the effects of a high CO 2 emission scenario on the Mediterranean Sea biogeochemical state at the end of the XXI century, with a focus on carbon cycling, budgets and fluxes, within and between the Mediterranean sub-basins, and on ocean acidification. As a result of the overall warming of surface water and exchanges at the boundaries, the model results project an increment in both the plankton primary pr...

Ocean reanalyses integrate models and observations to provide a continuous and consistent reconstruction of the past physical and biogeochemical ocean states and variability. We present a reanalysis of the Mediterranean Sea biogeochemistry at a 1/24° resolution developed within the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) framework. The reanalysis is based on the Biogeochemical Flux Model (BFM) coupled with a v...

Ocean acidification (OA) is expected to impact habitat-forming species (HFS), with cascading effects on the whole marine ecosystem and related services that are seldom quantified. Here, the changes in HFSs biomass due to OA are modeled using a food web ecosystem model, and the trophic and non-trophic cascading effects on the marine community are investigated. The food web model represents a well-studied coastal marine protecte...

Knowledge of connectivity among subpopulations is fundamental in the identification of the appropriate geographical scales for stock status evaluation and management, the identification of areas with greater retention rates, and space‐based fisheries management. Here, an integration of hydrodynamic, biological, and habitat models results is used to assess connectivity and support the definition of essential fish habitats (EFH)...

Eutrophication is one of the most important anthropogenic pressures impacting coastal seas. In Europe, several legislations and management measures have been implemented to halt nutrient overloading in marine ecosystems. This study evaluates the impact of freshwater nutrient control measures on higher trophic levels (HTL) in European marine ecosystems following descriptors and criteria as defined by the Marine Strategy Framewo...

The quality of the upgraded version of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) biogeochemical operational system of the Mediterranean Sea (MedBFM) is assessed in terms of consistency and forecast skill, following a mixed validation protocol that exploits different reference data from satellite, oceanographic databases, Biogeochemical Argo floats, and literature. We show that the quality of the MedBFM syste...