Coastal wetlands, such as saltmarshes and mangroves that fringe transitional waters, deliver important ecosystem services that support human development. Coastal wetlands are complex social-ecological systems that occur at all latitudes, from polar regions to the tropics. This overview covers wetlands in five continents. The wetlands are of varying size, catchment size, human population and stages of economic development. Economic sectors and activities in and around the coastal wetlands and their catchments exert multiple, direct pressures. These pressures affect the state of the wetland environment, ecology and valuable ecosystem services. All the coastal wetlands were found to be affected in some ways, irrespective of the conservation status. The main economic sectors were agriculture, animal rearing including aquaculture, fisheries, tourism, urbanization, shipping, industrial development and mining. Specific human activities include land reclamation, damming, draining and water extraction, construction of ponds for aquaculture and salt extraction, construction of ports and marinas, dredging, discharge of effluents from urban and industrial areas and logging, in the case of mangroves, subsistence hunting and oil and gas extraction. The main pressures were loss of wetland habitat, changes in connectivity affecting hydrology and sedimentology, as well as contamination and pollution. These pressures lead to changes in environmental state, such as erosion, subsidence and hypoxia that threaten the sustainability of the wetlands. There are also changes in the state of the ecology, such as loss of saltmarsh plants and seagrasses, and mangrove trees, in tropical wetlands. Changes in the structure and function of the wetland ecosystems affect ecosystem services that are often underestimated. The loss of ecosystem services impacts human welfare as well as the regulation of climate change by coastal wetlands. These cumulative impacts and multi-stressors are further aggravated by indirect pressures, such as sea-level rise.

Marine environmental monitoring has tended to focus on site-specific methods of investigation. These traditional methods have low spatial and temporal resolution and are relatively labour intensive per unit area/time that they cover. To implement the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), European Member States are required to improve marine monitoring and design monitoring networks. This can be achieved by developing and testing innovative and cost-effective monitoring systems, as well as indicators of environmental status. Here, we present several recently developed methodologies and technologies to improve marine biodiversity indicators and monitoring methods. The innovative tools are discussed concerning the technologies presently utilized as well as the advantages and disadvantages of their use in routine monitoring. In particular, the present analysis focuses on: (i) molecular approaches, including microarray, Real Time quantitative PCR (qPCR), and metagenetic (metabarcoding) tools; (ii) optical (remote) sensing and acoustic methods; and (iii) in situ monitoring instruments. We also discuss their applications in marine monitoring within the MSFD through the analysis of case studies in order to evaluate their potential utilization in future routine marine monitoring. We show that these recently-developed technologies can present clear advantages in accuracy, efficiency and cost.

This study relates sea surface temperature (SST) to the upwelling conditions off the southwest coast of Portugal using statistical analyses of publically available data. Optimum Interpolation (OI) of daily SST data were extracted from the United States (US) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and data for wind speed and direction were from the US National Climatic Data Center. Time series were extracted at a daily frequency for a time horizon of 26years. Upwelling indices were estimated using westerly (Qx) and southerly (Qy) Ekman transport components.In the first part of the study, time series were inspected for trend and seasonality over the whole period. The seasonally adjusted time series revealed an increasing slope for SST (0.15°C per decade) and decreasing slopes for Qx (−84.01m3s−1km−1 per decade) and Qy (−25.20m3s−1km−1 per decade), over the time horizon. Structural breaks analysis applied to the time series showed that a statistically significant incremental increase in SST was more pronounced during the last decade.Cross-correlation between upwelling indices and SST revealed a time delay of 5 and 2days between Qx and SST, and between Qy and SST, respectively. A spectral analysis combined with the previous analysis enabled the identification of four oceanographic seasons. Those seasons were later recognised over a restricted time period of 4years, between 2008 and 2012, when there was an extensive sampling programme for the validation of ocean colour remote sensing imagery. The seasons were defined as: summer, with intense and regular events of upwelling; autumn, indicating relaxation of upwelling conditions; and spring and winter, showing high interannual variability in terms of number and intensity of upwelling events