Knowledge transfer for management and conservation

Ensuring the sustainable management, conservation and restoration of the deep sea natural capital, including the resources and ecosystem services, in balance with economic and social development, has been recognized at the highest levels of the scientific and political agendas. In this regard, we develop scientific research to inform the identification and conservation of Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems and the implementation of Area-Based Management Tools for the implementation of the Maritime Spatial Planning and the designation of Marine Protected Areas. We are also engaged with informing the environmental regulations to govern deep seabed mining and developing tools for the restoration of deep-sea coral gardens.

New technologies for democratizing access to the deep-sea

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development recognizes the need to reduce inequality in ocean research capacity. In this context, the ADSR group developed a cost-effective video platform that enables rapid assessment of benthic habitats in the deep ocean. Built with commercially available components, the Azor drift-cam is an effective, affordable, simple to assemble, easy to operate, and reliable instrument for visual exploration of the deep sea down to 1,000 m depth. The main driver behind the development of this technology is to democratize deep-sea exploration by sharing a simple but versatile instrument that can be used aboard small local vessels to explore shelf and deep-sea habitats.

Deep-sea exploration

Our good friend Paul Snelgrove, explained it all:
"We know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about the deep sea floor…”
At the ADSR group, we spend a considerable amount of time exploring unknown areas of our planet, visiting, for the first time, many seamounts and small ridges in the Azores, the Atlantic Ocean, and other ocean basis. Collaborations with the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute and other international organizations provide detailed maps of geomorphological structures for our explorations. Our low-cost imaging technologies along with other more effective tools allowed us to discover new deep-sea species, habitats, biotopes, species associations, and even new hydrothermal vents.

Understanding deep-sea ecosystems

Understanding the biology, ecology, biogeography and spatial distributions of marine organisms is of paramount importance for advancing scientific understanding of the deep-sea and inform management. In the ADSR, we develop integrated research targeting key deep-sea taxa, including cold-water corals, and sponges but also deep-sea fishes, and key deep-water marine ecosystems, such as seamounts, mid-ocean ridges, and island slopes. We have found that black corals that attain millennial ages and that the Azores is a hotspot of cold-water coral diversity in the NE Atlantic.

Climate change impacts on deep-sea fauna

The deep sea plays a critical role in climate regulation through uptake and storage of heat and carbon dioxide. These regulating services have consequences for the health of the ocean causing warming, acidification, and deoxygenation of deep waters, leading to decrease in food availability at the seafloor. In the ADSR group, we develop experimental and modelling research to unveil the impacts of climate change in the physiology, biodiversity, and distribution of deep-sea fauna, including species that underpin Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems as well as commercially important deep-sea fishes. We showed that cold-water corals and fish are vulnerable to predicted climate change with drastic consequences on their distributions.

Impacts of human activities in the deep-sea

Bottom fishing and deep seabed mining threaten deep-sea ecosystems, modifying the seafloor morphology and its physical properties, removing benthic fauna sitting still on the seabed, and generating potentially toxic plumes from mining operations. At the ADSR group, we conduct field work, laboratory experiments, and models to quantify the impact of human activities in the marine environment. We demonstrated that these human activities affect local biodiversity, species abundance and ecosystem services, as well as the marine food webs and deep sea ecosystem functioning.