Coastal ecosystems play a major role in global carbon cycling and storage, yet the contribution of calcifying macroalgal habitats, such as coralline algal beds (CABs; rhodolith and maerl beds), remains poorly understood. Because carbon cycling in CABs is governed by community productivity and calcification, which exert opposing effects on seawater carbonate chemistry, understanding the balance between these processes is essent...

Rhodolith beds are globally distributed benthic habitats that play a key role in supporting associated faunal communities and serve as important biodiversity hotspots. Their ecological importance has been attributed to their ability to increase habitat complexity. In this context, rhodoliths are considered habitat-forming species (primary facilitator) that potentially support the establishment of further habitat providers, suc...

Aim Foundation species sustain biodiversity by providing habitat, resources, and protection from environmental stress. However, their influence on environmental severity and variability and their role in shaping diversity across spatial scales remain poorly understood. We conducted a large‐scale study to assess how environmental conditions and community diversity vary between areas with and without canopy‐forming macroalgae ac...

The angelshark, Squatina squatina , is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and remaining populations are highly fragmented throughout its historical distribution. The Canary Islands archipelago in the North East Atlantic has been identified as a uniquely large stronghold for the species. In the present study, we compared the population genetic structure of S. squatina across different is...

Similar to other coastal regions worldwide, forests created by brown macroalgae have severely declined in recent decades across the Macaronesian oceanic archipelagos (northeastern Atlantic), eroding the provision of ecosystem services. However, the putative effects of natural and anthropogenic stressors (both local and global) on such declines across spatial and temporal scales remain unresolved. Our research endeavored to inv...

Black corals are important components of mesophotic and deep-water marine habitats. Their presence at great depths (e.g., 50 to 200 m) makes accessibility difficult, limiting our understanding of the associated biodiversity. Amphipods dominate vagile epifauna in marine habitats around the world, fulfilling important ecosystem functions. However, there are no studies on amphipods exclusively associated with black corals, includ...

Aim The description of species' ranges provides biogeographical information to explain fundamental macroecological and evolutionary processes. In this study, we investigated the Rapoport's rule for the world's seagrasses, that is, whether the range extent of seagrasses increases from the tropics to the poles. Location Global. Taxon Seagrasses. Methods We examined whether four range geographical metrics: the extent of latitudin...

The present study aims at assessing the thermal tolerance of the black coral Antipathella wollastoni (Gray, 1857), which forms extensive forests in multiple Macaronesian islands. Fragments of A. wollastoni were exposed for 15 d to temperature conditions ranging from 19 to 26.5 °C, and multiple endpoints were investigated. No mortality was observed, and total antioxidant capacity remained unaffected by temperature increase. Res...

Understanding the extent to which species’ traits mediate patterns of community assembly is key to predict the effect of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on ecosystem functioning. Here, we apply a trait-based community assembly framework to understand how four different habitat configurations (kelp forests, Sargassum spp. beds, hard corals, and turfs) shape the trophic and energetic dynamics of reef fish assemblages in a...

Coralline algae are important components in a large variety of ecosystems. Among them, rhodoliths are a group of free-living coralline red algae that cover extensive coastal areas, from tropical to polar regions. In contrast to other ecosystem engineers, limited research efforts preclude our understanding of their physiology, underlying mechanisms, drivers and potential differences related to species under varying environments...

The introduction and successful expansion of tropical species into temperate systems is being exacerbated by climate change, and it is particularly important to identify the impacts that those species may have, especially when habitat-forming species are involved. Seagrass meadows are key shallow coastal habitats that provide critical ecosystem services worldwide, and they are threatened by the arrival of non-native macroalgae...