About my research interests and progress

I'm interested in how marine phytoplankton adaptation to Climate Changes affects species distribution and biodiversity. Obviously, this is a too broad topic to be addressed by one person at once, but this is my long term goal.

Currently:

Since July 2017 I’m part of the Biological Oceanography Research group at the University of Vigo, working with Emilio Marañón in a new project funded by the Galician Government. The title of the Project is “Effect on marine phytoplankton communities of the interaction between temperature increase and nitrate depletion (acronym INTENSO)”. The general goal of the project is to mechanistically understand the response of marine phytoplankton to environmental changes produced by climate change, at both cell and community levels. In particular, we focus on two key factors for the phytoplankton metabolism and species distribution: warming and nitrate availability decrease.

We will use phytoplankton culture experiments and models to achieve these particular objectives:

1- To characterize at metabolic level the difference between the phytoplankton short-time and long-time (acclimated) response to warming

2- To characterize the effect of that nitrate depletion has over the phytoplankton acclimation to warming.

3- To predict the marine phytoplankton community response to the change on temperatura and nitrate availability, using specific traits and its plasticity.

4- To analyze how the combination of warming and N depletion can affect species competition, and therefore the community functional composition and/or the community net metabolism.

Postdoc:

During the last year (2016-2017) I’ve conducted an outreach Project funded by ASLO association. In this project, we have created a puppet show to educate children between 3 and 7 years old about the problems of plastic contamination in the sea. The show tells about the misfortune of several marine organisms, including plankton, when they encounter an evil monster form of human plastic waste. In the final scene, we show the children that only humans can solve the problem, and recycling is the best tool.

During three years (2014-2017), including a 2-years postdoc in the Kellogg Biological Station (Michigan State University), I've been exploring how adaptation to warming together with low nitrogen concentration can influence the temperature traits in marine diatoms. To do so, I characterized the thermal reaction norm at different nitrate levels for several species, and I carried out evolution experiments with some of them. I exposed the algae to temperatures over their optimum and limiting nitrate conditions, to study how long-term exposure to those conditions can select for populations with different temperature traits.

You can check the performances in this Youtube video: https://youtu.be/bOZDFI4IEiw

During two years I wrotte an outreach blog about evolution and ecology: http://ecofitoplancton.blogspot.com.es (in Spanish)

PhD. THESIS:

I defended my PhD. thesis on 13th April 2012, in biological oceanography in the University of Vigo. I obtained the maximum mark. My thesis work is about microbial plankton community production and respiration, mainly focused on the metabolic balance of the North Atlantic oligotrophic gyre. You can see my thesis dissertation (in Spanish) in the following link: tv.campusdomar.es or you can download the pdf file (in Spanish) in here: www.investigo.biblioteca.uvigo.es

Briefly, my thesis dissertation content is:

During the last decades, an intense debate has arisen about if ocean oligotrophic regions (the North Atlantic gyre included) act as a sink or a source of the carbon exchanged with the atmosphere. If the balance between community production and respiration in oligotrophic oceans is positive, those regions will be acting like a sink of carbon and important amounts of CO2 would be captured from the atmosphere. On the contrary, if the balance between production and respiration is negative, oligotrophic oceans will be acting like sources of carbon and important amounts of CO2 would be released to the atmosphere.

Despite the low productivity of those oligotrophic regions, these areas are very extensive and the understanding of how they work is essential for the quantification of the global carbon cycling. It is necessary, for example, to make predictions about the CO2 emissions effect on the climate.

With the aim of understanding the plankton community metabolism in the oceanic oligotrophic regions, a cruise was carried out in the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyral Province East. During that cruise plankton community production and respiration rates were estimated together with other physicochemical and biological variables. The cruise included an initial latitudinal transect and two lagrangian experiments. Results showed that the microbial metabolism tends to be balanced in the centre of the oligotrophic gyre, and the characterization of net community production with an adequate temporal and spatial scale can reconcile the discrepancies between different methodologies.

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