| Summary: | Crustose coralline algae are a major benthic carbonate producer, especially in the temperate seas. The global change will induce ocean acidification, leading to dissolution of marine carbonates starting from aragonite and high-Mg calcite. The idea that corallines are an important element of the global carbon budget is widely accepted and many researches worldwide are devoted to understand their growth rate and physiological behaviour in the present-day marine environment and under conditions of lowered pH. Corallines are a topic for both life scientists and earth scientists, who are separated by their different cultural backgrounds and by the different temporal and spatial scale of their approach. The next scientific challenge is to overcome these difficulties: 1) by creating a common, shared language (systematic palaeontology vs. biology; limits of coralline palaeontology and usable diagnostic criteria; definitions of maërl, rhodoliths, prälines, coated grains, algal pavement, coralligène, crustose framework, etc.); 2) by linking observations and data obtained at the organism level to those obtained at the scale of geomorphologic units (such as a bay or a shelf). The results of some case-histories of large-scale quantification of coralline carbonate abundance in the present-day environment and in the past is reported, as a tool to improve our modelling the impact of the global change
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