• SDSN - Greece
• Publicationsclose
• Research softwareclose
• EU close
• Hal-Diderot close
• HAL Descartes close
• Hyper Article en Ligne close
• Hyper Article en Ligne - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société close
• European Marine Science close

Habitat-forming cold-water corals (CWCs) represent a key component of deep-sea benthic communities and a priority target for conservation. Although research efforts have been mounting to try and identify the drivers of CWC distributions, progress has been limited by the scarcity of ecological data. The present work employs habitat suitability models (HSMs) to estimate spatial distributions, environmental drivers and co-existence patterns of 14 habitat-forming CWCs in the Azores, an area considered a hotspot of coral diversity in the Atlantic. The modelled CWCs showed a strong bathymetric zonation, which seems to be determined by the vertical stratification of water masses in the region. In particular, the modelled CWCs can be clustered in four groups named after the isopycnal (vertical) layers in which Atlantic water masses are organized: species restricted to upper water masses, species extending down from upper water masses, species restricted to intermediate water masses and species extending up from deep water masses. Horizontal patterns further indicate that the Azores Current and different production regimes north and south of the archipelago likely influence the distribution of CWCs in sub-surface waters. Such results have important implications for the regional management of deep-sea benthic communities and, in particular, for the design of representative networks of protected areas. The combined habitat of all modelled species covered only 11%. Given that they all possess the characteristics of benthic foundation organisms and represent indicator taxa of vulnerable marine ecosystems all the modelled species should be viewed as important targets for conservation. The lace coral Errina dabneyi deserves particular attention since this species appears to be endemic to the Azores and has a very limited estimated distribution.

International audience

International audience

The impact of human sewage on environmental and food contamination constitutes an important safety issue. Indeed, human sewage reflects the microbiome of the local population, and a variety of human viruses can be detected in wastewater samples. Being able to describe the diversity of viruses present in sewage will provide information on the health of the surrounding population health and will help to prevent further transmission. Metagenomic developments, allowing the description of all the different genomes present in a sample, are very promising tools for virome analysis. However, looking for human enteric viruses with short RNA genomes which are present at low concentrations is challenging. In this study we demonstrate the benefits of performing technical replicates to improve viral identification by increasing contig length, and the set-up of quality criteria to increase confidence in results. Our approach was able to effectively identify some virus sequences and successfully describe the viral diversity. The method yielded full genomes either for norovirus, enterovirus and rotavirus, even if, for these segmented genomes, combining genes remain a difficult issue. Developing reliable viromic methods is important as wastewater sample analysis provides an important tool to prevent further virus transmission by raising alerts in case of viral outbreaks or emergence.

ABSTRACTMarine ecosystem models have been used to project the impacts of climate-induced changes in temperature and oxygen on biodiversity mainly through changes in species spatial distributions and primary production. However, fish populations may also respond to climatic pressures via physiological changes, leading to modifications in their life history that could either mitigate or worsen the consequences of climate change.Building on the individual-based multispecies ecosystem model OSMOSE, Bioen-OSMOSE has been developed to account for high trophic levels’ physiological responses to temperature and oxygen in future climate projections. This paper presents an overview of the Bioen-OSMOSE model, mainly detailing the new developments. These consist in the implementation of a bioenergetic sub-model that mechanistically describes somatic growth, sexual maturation and reproduction as they emerge from the energy fluxes sustained by food intake under the hypotheses of a biphasic growth model and plastic maturation age and size represented by a maturation reaction norm. These fluxes depend on temperature and oxygen concentration, thus allowing plastic physiological responses to climate change.To illustrate the capabilities of Bioen-OSMOSE to represent realistic ecosystem dynamics, the model is applied to the North Sea ecosystem. The model outputs are confronted with population biomass, catch, maturity ogive, mean size-at-age and diet data of each species of the fish community. A first exploration of current species spatial variability in response to temperature or oxygen is presented in this paper. The model succeeds in reproducing observations, with good performances for all indicators.This new model development opens the scope for new fields of research such as the exploration of seasonal or spatial variation in life history in response to biotic and abiotic factors at the individual, population and community levels. Understanding such variability is crucial to improve our knowledge on potential climate change impacts on marine ecosystems and to make more reliable projections under climate change scenarios.

International audience; Autophagy is a pleiotropic and evolutionarily conserved process in eukaryotes that encompasses different types of mechanisms by which cells deliver cytoplasmic constituents to the lysosome for degradation. Interestingly, in mammals, two different and specialized autophagic pathways, (i) the chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) and (ii) the endosomal microautophagy (eMI), both rely on the use of the same cytosolic chaperone HSPA8 (also known as HSC70) for targeting specific substrates to the lysosome. However, this is not true for all organisms, and differences exist between species with respect to the coexistence of these two autophagic routes. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of the evolutionary history of the main components of CMA and eMI and discuss how the observed discrepancies between species may contribute to improving our knowledge of these two functions and their interplays.

Abstract This study examined some of the spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of species targeting and discarding, for the French bottom trawlers operating in the eastern English Channel, building on spatial overlaps (or mismatches) between fishing effort, survey-based biomass or abundance indices and discard rates. We first identified that cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis), squids (Loligo sp.) and, to a lesser degree, striped red mullet (Mullus surmuletus), and seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) were the main targets, while fishing for historically important species was less attractive. This result was broadly in accord with catch compositions, although mackerel (Scomber scombrus) targeting was possibly underestimated. We also showed that the distributions of fishing effort and of undersized herring, plaice, and whiting did not overlap. Although fishing effort covered fishing grounds populated with undersized horse mackerel, the proportion of undersized individuals in the discards was small. Plaice and whiting discard rates overlapped in space with undersized abundance indices. Fishing effort may have avoided spatial units with potentially high plaice discard rates, which may have been driven by large proportions of undersized fish, but also by restricted access to coastal area. Overall, the EU Landing Obligation had limited effects on fishing effort allocation relative to either undersized abundance or discard rates distributions.

Short summary We summarize results during the last 5 years in the northern Eurasian region, especially from Russia, and introduce recent observations of the air quality in the urban environments in China. Although the scientific knowledge in these regions has increased, there are still gaps in our understanding of large-scale climate–Earth surface interactions and feedbacks. This arises from limitations in research infrastructures and integrative data analyses, hindering a comprehensive system analysis. The Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) Science Plan, released in 2015, addressed a need for a holistic system understanding and outlined the most urgent research needs for the rapidly changing Arctic-boreal region. Air quality in China, together with the long-range transport of atmospheric pollutants, was also indicated as one of the most crucial topics of the research agenda. These two geographical regions, the northern Eurasian Arctic-boreal region and China, especially the megacities in China, were identified as a “PEEX region”. It is also important to recognize that the PEEX geographical region is an area where science-based policy actions would have significant impacts on the global climate. This paper summarizes results obtained during the last 5 years in the northern Eurasian region, together with recent observations of the air quality in the urban environments in China, in the context of the PEEX programme. The main regions of interest are the Russian Arctic, northern Eurasian boreal forests (Siberia) and peatlands, and the megacities in China. We frame our analysis against research themes introduced in the PEEX Science Plan in 2015. We summarize recent progress towards an enhanced holistic understanding of the land–atmosphere–ocean systems feedbacks. We conclude that although the scientific knowledge in these regions has increased, the new results are in many cases insufficient, and there are still gaps in our understanding of large-scale climate–Earth surface interactions and feedbacks. This arises from limitations in research infrastructures, especially the lack of coordinated, continuous and comprehensive in situ observations of the study region as well as integrative data analyses, hindering a comprehensive system analysis. The fast-changing environment and ecosystem changes driven by climate change, socio-economic activities like the China Silk Road Initiative, and the global trends like urbanization further complicate such analyses. We recognize new topics with an increasing importance in the near future, especially “the enhancing biological sequestration capacity of greenhouse gases into forests and soils to mitigate climate change” and the “socio-economic development to tackle air quality issues”.

Behavioral parameters are reliable and useful operational welfare indicators that yield information on fish health and welfare status in aquaculture. However, aquatic environment is still constraining for some solutions based on underwater cameras or echo sounder transmitters. Thus, the use of bio-loggers internally or externally attached to sentinel fish emerges as a solution for fish welfare monitoring in tanks- and sea cages-rearing systems. This review is focused on the recently developed AEFishBIT, a small and light data storage tag designed to be externally attached to fish operculum for individual and simultaneous monitoring of swimming activity and ventilation rates under steady and unsteady swimming conditions for short-term periods. AEFishBIT is a tri-axial accelerometer with a frequency sampling of 50¿100 Hz that is able to provide proxy measurements of physical and metabolic activities validated by video recording, exercise tests in swim tunnel respirometers, and differential operculum and body tail movements across fish species with differences in swimming capabilities. Tagging procedures based on tag piercing and surgery procedures are adapted to species anatomical head and operculum features, which allowed trained operators to quickly complete the tagging procedure with a fast post-tagging recovery of just 2.5¿7 h in both salmonid (rainbow trout, Atlantic salmon) and non-salmonid (gilthead sea bream, European sea bass) farmed fish. Dual recorded data are processed by on-board algorithms, providing valuable information on adaptive behavior through the productive cycle with the changing environment and genetics. Such biosensing approach also provides valuable information on social behavior in terms of adaptive capacities or changes in daily or seasonal activity, linking respiratory rates with changes in metabolic rates and energy partitioning between growth and physical activity. At short-term, upcoming improvements in device design and accompanying software are envisaged, including energy-harvesting techniques aimed to prolong the battery life and the addition of a gyroscope for the estimation of the spatial distribution of fish movements. Altogether, the measured features of AEFishBIT will assist researchers, fish farmers and breeders to establish stricter welfare criteria, suitable feeding strategies, and to produce more robust and efficient fish in a changing environment, helping to improve fish management and aquaculture profitability. This work was supported by the EU H2020 Research Innovation Program under grant agreement no. 871108 (AQUAEXCEL3.0). This output reflects only the author’s view and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. Additional funding was obtained by the Spanish MCIN project Bream-AquaINTECH (RTI2018–094128-B-I00, AEI/FEDER, UE) to JP-S and JC-G. This study forms part of the ThinkInAzul programme and was supported by MCIN with funding from European Union NextGenerationEU (PRTR-C17.I1) and by Generalitat Valenciana (THINKINAZUL/2021/024) to JP-S.

Abstract The term ‘coastal fisheries’ designates a form of fishing which is under heavy pressure due to competition by large-scale high sea fishing. Setting up markets for seafood from coastal fisheries might offer possibilities of product differentiation when appreciated by consumers. The aim of this research is to analyse the potential of marketing seafood from coastal fisheries by investigating consumers’ perception of coastal fisheries and their attitudes towards a label for coastal fishery products in France and Italy. This research combined qualitative (focus groups) and quantitative methods (online survey) in two different steps. ‘Coastal fisheries’ were mainly perceived positively, as they provide fresh products, and are healthy and important for coastal areas. Although opinions on labelling in general, and on coastal fisheries specifically, varied widely, about 70% of the respondents were in favour of a coastal fisheries label. The willingness to use a coastal fisheries label increased significantly when domestic origin, high-quality products, eco-friendliness, support of local/coastal communities and artisanal fishing practices were part of this kind of label. It is concluded that using a label for communicating the origin coastal fisheries appears to be promising for the two study countries: France and Italy. A prerequisite for the success of this kind of approach is that the seafood products must fully comply with consumer expectations, as they are of domestic origin, be of very high product quality and fished in an artisanal or eco-friendly manner.