Last week
we were happy to attend the ASLO meeting in Palma de Mallorca (https://www.aslo.org/palma-2023/).
The event was held at the Palau de Congressos de Palma from 4 to 9 June 2023.
The
Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) is the
leading organization for researchers and educators in aquatic sciences. Founded
in 1936, it has nowadays over 4,000 members. ASLO organizes annual meetings on
aquatic and ocean sciences that are a cornerstone for the researchers in the
field.
The meeting
at Palma was very enjoyable, with over 3,000 delegates from all over the world
and many topical scientific sessions, together with keynote addresses from
leading scientists and stakeholders and a rich panoply of social events.
BigPark was
present in ALSO-2023 with a talk in the session “Novel molecular tools to
assess biodiversity and resilience of aquatic environments”, chaired by Owen S
Wangensteen. The talk was given by Xavier Turon, and presenting the results of
the genetic monitoring undertaken in Cies and Cabrera since 2014.
Here is the
title and abstract of the talk:
Biomonitoring marine sanctuaries: a six-year
study of Spanish National Parks using metabarcoding of benthic reef
communities.
Xavier Turon, Adrià Antich, Jesús Zarcero, Creu
Palacín, Owen Simon Wangensteen
Metabarcoding has proven an effective method
for comprehensive biodiversity assessment. However, its application in
biomonitoring requires the generation of time series data, which are mostly
wanting. We have obtained COI metabarcoding datasets of benthic reef
communities of the two marine National Parks established in Spain, one in the
Mediterranean (Cabrera Archipelago), and the other in the Atlantic (Cíes
Islands) coast. These sanctuaries are under stress as a result of invasive
seaweeds and warming. We have sampled four (Cabrera) and three (Cíes) time
points over a six-year span (2014-2020), analyzing five community-types in each
Park, with and without invasive algae.
We devised a method for direct sampling of the
reef communities using quadrats and size-fractionation. The generation of time
series required adjustments of the bioinformatics pipelines as the volume of
data grew exponentially. We chose to reduce the datasets at each time point
using a denoising procedure within samples that took into account the
variability of each codon position in the coding sequences. These reduced
datasets can be easily assembled, and clustered into molecular operational
taxonomic units, at desired time points.
Our results showed a highly diverse assemblage,
with ca. 270,000 sequence variants that clustered into 35,543 molecular
operational taxonomic units (MOTUs). The effect of invasive algae was overall
minor, while a clear effect of time was detected at the last sampling date
(2020), indicating ongoing changes. Our study proves the feasibility of
biomonitoring benthic reef communities over time, and our survey will continue
in the forthcoming years.
BigPark
members Xavier Turon, Owen S Wangensteen, Jesús Zarcero, and Adrià Antich
enjoying sunny weather during ASLO-2023 
Xavier
Turon during his talk at ASLO-2023 |
