Dear Colleagues,

Climate change and related threats are directly affecting marine benthic ecosystems worldwide, altering the abundance, distribution, and productivity of their communities. In this context, understanding how accelerating environmental change will affect biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is crucial for implementing effective management actions for natural systems. For this, experimentally generated datasets, based on empirical data about the responses of different species and species assemblages of benthic primary producers, are very useful for predicting the impacts of environmental change (i.e., changes in the structure of ecological communities, loss of biodiversity, reduction of ecosystem functions) and for implementing adequate conservation actions.

The growing body of experimental evidence reveals a very broad range of species’ responses to climate change pressures that prevents clear predictions about the biological impacts of climate change at the ecosystem level. Thus, more information about the responses of predominant and key species, multiple-species assemblages, and species interactions to individual and combined environmental factors associated with the ongoing climate change are required to confidently translate the wide range of organismal responses into ecosystem responses in the future. In this regard, research at different organizational levels (e.g., molecular, cellular, organism) provides useful information for understanding how individuals integrate responses to climate change. This knowledge is also crucial to understand and extrapolate the readjustments and consequences of climate change at higher organizational levels (community, population, and ecosystem).

This Special Issue welcomes contributions related to all aspects of global change effects on benthic primary producers (e.g., seagrasses, macroalgae, corals), including aspects related to their biology, geology, ecology, physiology, molecular biology, microbiology, chemical ecology, taxonomy, species interactions, and biogeography. Contributions addressing reviews and meta-analyses of reported climate change responses of these organisms are encouraged.

Dr. Nadine Schubert
Dr. Irene Olivé
Guest Editors

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• climate change impacts
• species responses
• community responses