On Thursday, December 14, at 11:00 h, Marta Román, a research technician in the Biological Oceanography group at the University of Vigo, presented the final lecture of the 7th edition of the “Café con Sal” program, sharing the most relevant results of her doctoral thesis in the talk titled “Integrated environmental assessment of anthropization processes in estuarine ecosystems: Land use changes and matter inputs.”
Over the past 300 years, nearly 39% of the Earth’s surface has been converted into agricultural lands and human settlements, leading to climate change, biodiversity loss, and disruption of biogeochemical cycles, including the nitrogen cycle. The production of synthetic fertilizers, the emission of nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel combustion, and the generation of human-derived wastewater have increased the concentrations of this nutrient. When exported to rivers and estuaries, it causes eutrophication, degradation, and even the disappearance of some coastal ecosystems, such as seagrass meadows. Eutrophication of seagrass meadows not only limits their function as providers of ecosystem services but can also transform their role from a carbon sink to a source of CO₂.
In this context, the REIMAGE project (Response of coastal ecosystems to allochthonous matter inputs under anthropogenic global environmental change), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (National R&D+i Plan), was launched. Marta Román, under the supervision of Gonzalo Méndez (Strategic Environmental Assessment) and Emilio Fernández (Biological Oceanography) at the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo, developed her doctoral thesis within this project. With participation from the CSIC, the researchers aim to develop integrated environmental assessments to create early-warning indicators of anthropization in drainage basins, linked to eutrophication in associated estuarine environments.
During the lecture, Marta Román emphasized the importance of conserving seagrass meadows, focusing on the most notable findings from her study, such as the relationships between anthropogenic pressure variables in the catchments and the nitrogen isotope values in Zostera noltei meadows, as well as some of the limitations encountered when interpreting nitrogen isotope values as indicators of human-induced eutrophication.
The lecture took place at 11:00 a.m. in the Assembly Hall of the Faculty of Marine Sciences at the University of Vigo, was broadcast live at http://tv.uvigo.es/es/directo/1.html, and is available on UVigoTV.
Marta Román’s conference poster
Videoconference
