Marine Sustainability: Present Challenges, Future Risks and Opportunities
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainability, Biodiversity and Conservation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 978
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plankton; food webs; evolutionary and systems ecology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Marine systems are ‘socio-ecological systems’, in which natural and economic processes are tightly interconnected. In the present era of global environmental changes and massive population growth along the coasts, sustainable development goals recommend that human societies manage marine environments in a way in which the latter maintain their stability and resilience. When exploited in a sustainable way, oceans and seas are able to absorb unavoidable anthropogenic impacts, keep functioning, and provide humans with goods and services.
Marine research is increasingly being asked to embrace sustainability studies, by accumulating scientific knowledge suitable to inform policy makers and roadmap management practices. The main challenge in this respect is envisioning ecological research to intercept economic interests, such as the virtuous utilization of the seascape for productive purposes, the sustainable harvesting of marine resources, etc. The main risk in such a paradigm shift is that basic research could lose its centrality; conversely, by entering sustainability science, we have the big opportunity to exploit ecological theories in the frame of applied research, e.g., to better characterize ecosystem functioning at pristine vs. impacted conditions.
This Special Issue calls for ecological studies that are run in a sustainable-development context. We seek studies focusing on interactions between economic activities and the ecological state of marine systems, as well as studies attempting to integrate environmental management and biological conservation and/or impact assessment. Both review and topical investigations are welcome. Among the latter, we encourage both advanced monitoring studies defining ecosystem-health indicators, and experimental efforts with key organisms, which apply general ecological principles to orient the sustainable use of marine systems.
Dr. Domenico D'Alelio
Dr. Emanuela Dattolo
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- Oceans and seas
- Coastal systems
- Fisheries
- Integrated coastal management
- Blue growth
- Evolutionary applications
- Ecosystem services
- Ecological economics
- Plankton
- Benthos
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