A 9-year monitoring of environmental changes over the continental shelf in the Catalan Sea from multiparametric measurements

Abstract

Long-term global warming trends reported in the last decades by NOAA-NASA may be accelerating in recent years (Peñuelas et al., 2017). Extreme global average temperatures reported since 2014 are consistent with the largest annual atmospheric CO2 what may be a signal of slowdown of carbon sequestration, in oceans and continents. The Mediterranean Sea warming trend is in line with global warming (Schroeder et al., 2016). Coastal marine ecosystems in the Mediterranean are particularly exposed to the effect of warming, as they hold relatively high biodiversity at shallow water layers. Longer and warmer summer periods are related to massive mortalities of benthic (deep-sea) organisms (Bensoussan et al., 2010), because the specific temperature ranges of some species may be overtaken