Integrating multiple approaches to identify winners and losers in high-diverse marine benthic communities in the face of global change

Coastal ecosystems are increasingly impacted by several local and global stressors including overfishing, pollution, and climate change. The cumulative effects of multiple threats have driven local extinctions with the subsequent alteration of the structure and composition of benthic ecosystems, but less is known about how global change is altering the ecosystem functioning of highly diverse temperate reefs in the Mediterranean Sea such as coralligenous assemblages. This habitat exhibit a high structural complexity and are dominated by long-lived algae and sessile invertebrates, which exhibit low dynamics and belong to a variety of taxonomic groups, harboring between 10-20% of Mediterranean species. Coralligenous species are affected by several local and regional stressors and understanding how different species and populations will respond to anthropogenic pressures is key to develop sound management strategies and conservation actions. The aim of this presentation is to show how the combination multiple approaches such as long-term field monitoring, aquaria experiments, demographic and spatial modeling is crucial to identify the winners and losers at the species and population level, potential range shifts and changes in reproductive phenology. The contrasting responses observed among different species and populations to global change unravel the complexity to anticipate potential changes in the future configuration of coralligenous assemblages but also highlight some promising capacity of this highly diverse habitat to buffer global change effects