Historical record of Corallium rubrum and its changing carbon sequestration capacity: A meta-analysis from the North Western Mediterranean.

BACKGROUND: There is a scarcity of long time-span and geographically wide research on the health status of Corallium rubrum, including limited research on its historical ecology and carbon sequestration capacity. OBJECTIVES: To reconstruct the temporal trends of the most reported C. rubrum population parameters in the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea and to determine the changes in total carbon sequestration by this species. DATA SOURCES: Quantitative and qualitative, academic and grey documents were collected from scientific web browsers, scientific libraries, and requests to scientists. STUDY ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: Documents with original information of basal diameter, height and/or weight per colony, with a depth limit of 60 m in the Catalan and Ligurian Seas were analyzed. SYNTHESIS METHODS: We calculated yearly average values of C. rubrum biometric parameters, as well as estimated total weight, carbon flux, and carbon fixation in the structures of C. rubrum's colonies. RESULTS: In both study areas, the values of the selected morphometric parameters for C. rubrum decreased until the 1990s, then increased from the 2000s, with average values surpassing the levels of the 1960s (Ligurian Sea) or reaching levels slightly lower than those of the 1980s (Catalan Sea). The difference in carbon sequestered between the oldest (1960s: Ligurian Sea; 1970s: Catalan Sea) and the lowest (1990s) biomass value of colonies is nearly double. LIMITATIONS: Quantitative data previous to the 1990s are very limited. Information on recent recovery trends in C. rubrum parameters is concentrated in a few areas and biased towards colonies in marine protected areas, with scarce quantitative information from colonies in other areas. CONCLUSIONS: The halt in the C. rubrum decreasing trend coincided with the exhaustion of tree-like colonies and the first recovery response due to effective protection measures in some areas. Nevertheless, C. rubrum climate change mitigation capacity through carbon sequestration can be drastically reduced from its potential in only a few decades.

Local indicators of climate change: The potential contribution of local knowledge to climate research.

Local knowledge has been proposed as a place-based tool to ground-truth climate models and to narrow their geographic sensitivity. To assess the potential role of local knowledge in our quest to understand better climate change and its impacts, we first need to critically review the strengths and weaknesses of local knowledge of climate change and the potential complementarity with scientific knowledge. With this aim, we conducted a systematic, quantitative meta-analysis of published peer-reviewed documents reporting local indicators of climate change (including both local observations of climate change and observed impacts on the biophysical and the social systems). Overall, primary data on the topic are not abundant, the methodological development is incipient, and the geographical extent is unbalanced. On the 98 case studies documented, we recorded the mention of 746 local indicators of climate change, mostly corresponding to local observations of climate change (40%), but also to observed impacts on the physical (23%), the biological (19%), and the socioeconomic (18%) systems. Our results suggest that, even if local observations of climate change are the most frequently reported type of change, the rich and fine-grained knowledge in relation to impacts on biophysical systems could provide more original contributions to our understanding of climate change at local scale.