Toyonobu Fujii, Daniel J. Pondella II, Victoria L. G. Todd and Andrew J. Guerin
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2023.1181568/full
During the past several centuries, marine coastal ecosystems have been altered at alarming rates as a result of ever increasing anthropogenic influences (McCauley et al., 2015; Halpern et al., 2019; Duarte et al., 2020). While impacts of anthropogenic climate change have already been manifested in the form of, for example, decreased ocean productivity, altered food web dynamics, and reduced abundance of habitat-forming species, e.g. corals, seagrass, mangroves, kelp forests (Waycott et al., 2009; Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno, 2010; Filbee-Dexter and Wernberg, 2018; FAO, 2020; Souter et al., 2021; FAO, 2022), effects of increasing installations of various artificial structures on marine ecosystems are poorly understood. Drawing on the success of the first edition (Fujii et al.), this volume aims to further advance research in the field of human impact on marine life via placement of “sub-sea artificial structures”. This Research Topic assembles 15 articles investigating relationships between various types of anthropogenic structure and marine ecosystem dynamics. Here we present an overview of these contributions and highlight emerging views and future directions in this field.
