Abstract

The ocean is the most important subsystem of the Earth’s climate system and functions as its heart, regulating the energy distribution of the planet. It has absorbed more than 90% of the energy accumulated since 1971 and about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide. As a result, water temperature rises and oceans acidify and deoxygenate, which lead to changes in oceanic circulationand biogeochemistry, to rising sea levels, to more extreme weather events, to shifts in the distribution ofspecies and migratory routes, and to loss of species and habitat diversity. Awareness of the importanceof oceans for the sustainability of the global human population is increasing, including the conservationof biodiversity and its legacy to future generations [1]. For instance, oceanic organisms are morevulnerable to warming than terrestrial ones, as the former are generally at temperatures near theirupper thermal limits and lack of thermal refuges [2]. Half of the atmospheric carbon fixed annuallyin natural systems is cycled into the ocean mainly by the biological carbon pump in the open ocean,but some of the main areas capturing and storing this carbon (as mangroves, seagrasses, salt marshes,and coastal upwelling ecosystems) cover less than 3% of the world’s ocean surface [3]. Particularly,

RAS ID

29837

Document Type

Editorial

Date of Publication

2020

School

School of Science / Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publisher

MDPI

Comments

Bode, A., Abrantes, F., Antunes, A., Benetazzo, A., Chen, C. T. A., Devred, E., ... Somoza, L. (2020). MDPI oceans: A new publication channel for open access science focused on the ocean. Oceans, 1(1), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.3390/oceans1010001

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.3390/oceans1010001