New insights into the ecology and conservation of bryozoans: from global diversity patterns to the responses to anthropogenic stressors in the Mediterranean Sea

• Main Author: Pagès Escolà, Marta
• Other Authors: Linares Prats, Cristina, Hereu Fina, Bernat, Universitat de Barcelona. Departament de Biologia Evolutiva, Ecologia i Ciències Ambientals
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Universitat de Barcelona 2019
• Subjects: Briozous; Influència de l'home en la natura; Ecologia marina; Bryozoa; Effect of human beings on nature; Marine ecology; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2445/149857; http://hdl.handle.net/10803/668538

[eng] Marine ecosystems are directly threatened by multiple and interactive human stressors at global and local scales. Hence, it is vital to study biodiversity and ecological patterns through a multi-disciplinary approach, from understanding global diversity patterns to evaluating the ecological responses of species to different impacts in order to protect marine ecosystems. In this thesis, we focused on bryozoans, an abundant group of sessile marine invertebrates distributed worldwide, but generally understudied. Accordingly, in this thesis we provide different approaches to understand discovery and macroecological patterns at global scales, and the response of species to different stressors at local scales, combining the use of open databases, the in situ monitoring of natural populations, experiments in aquaria and the development of restoration techniques. At global scale, in Chapter I we unraveled discovery patterns of fossil and extant bryozoans and showed the highest number of fossil species described, highlighting that the current biodiversity represents only a small proportion of Earth’s past biodiversity. Beyond these differences, both groups showed an increase in the taxonomic effort during the past century. Despite this progress, future projections of discovery patterns of both groups showed a large proportion of species remaining to be discovered by the final of this century. In Chapter II, most of the global diversity patterns of marine sessile groups, including bryozoans, showed a non-unimodal latitudinal pattern with a dip in the number of species at the equator and a higher diversity in the Southern ocean. Moreover, this region will be less affected by global warming at the final of this century. In contrast, our analyses showed that the most sampled region for both marine sessile species and bryozoans was North Temperate Atlantic, highlighting the importance to quantify environmental drivers considering sampling effort biases. For this reason, we tested the effect of using the popular method ...