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As we enter the UN decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable development, the marine environment continues to face many threats derived from anthropogenic impacts. It has been recognized that marine biodiversity is in crisis (IPBES, VII Plenary Session, Paris, 2019), and many initiatives are in place to prevent or mitigate biodiversity loss. At the basis and at the core of any successful management action, there is a need for accurate assessment of biodiversity and its responses. This poses a major challenge to science, especially considering the complexity and bewildering diversity of marine life.
New genetic and genomic techniques can alleviate in part this challenge, providing unprecedented biodiversity data (from community to species levels) and directly guiding management actions (Bourlat et al 2013, Danovaro et al 2016). Methods for fast and accurate detection of biodiversity and their potential for adaptation under changing environments are urgently needed to fully understand how biodiversity responds to human disturbances and to mitigate marine biodiversity loss. Here we define the concept ‘marine genomic challenges’ as the study of biodiversity conservation threats that marine ecosystems are currently facing using genomic tools.
Genomics opens a new research perspective to study biological diversity complementing, rather than substituting, traditional taxonomic and ecological approaches (indeed, the teams include well-known taxonomists). However, the slow pace of conventional research and the so-called taxonomic impediment (Wheeler 2008) require novel tools that can be immediately implemented to inform3 de 35 management decisions. We will combine the complementary expertise of the two teams, comprising ecologists, geneticists and taxonomists working on a wide array of marine taxa. Our objective is to develop scientifically-driven management tools to ensure the resilience and conservation of marine (mostly Mediterranean) ecosystems.
Our teams have been working for 20 years developing and applying state-of-the-art genetic tools to address challenges in marine research. The advent of high throughput sequencing (HTS) techniques opened an avenue of new possibilities that our teams have been exploring in the last 10 years. In this project, we seek to apply the latest HTS techniques to pressing issues in marine sciences, as well as to further explore new techniques to provide policy makers and stakeholders with novel, suitable tools to address societal challenges. These tools will directly improve management actions in conservation, human-impact assessment, and mitigation of biodiversity loss in the marine realm.
The project is organized in two subprojects, each addressing different challenges with the application of novel HTS techniques.
● Subproject 1 (CEAB): Marine Genomic Challenges: Big community data to monitor climate
change and environmental biosecurity
● Subproject 2 (UB): Marine Genomic Challenges: Diversity, connectivity and adaptation from
genomes to populations in keystone species.
The first subproject will deal with community-wide analyses using environmental DNA amplicon-sequencing techniques, while the second subproject will work at the population level, combining genomics and transcriptomics of relevant target species.
 

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