Grand challenges in marine ecosystems ecology

摘要

The study of marine ecosystems has become a hot research topic in recent times. In fact, the number of manuscripts including the words “marine ecosystems” published since 1970 has immensely increased reaching between 1100 and 1500 articles per year in the past ?ve years (Figure1). Based on the keywords used in these manuscripts, the most frequent topics can be grouped into: (i) marine ecosystems (28.8% of the papers); (ii) biodiversity (26.6%), used as keyword at any level of organization, such as bacteria, phytoplankton, zooplankton, benthos, ?shes, mammals, seabirds, etc.; (iii) functionality (10.7%), including aspects such as ecosystem function, biomass, foodwebs, primary and secondary production, etc.; (iv) environmental research (9.7%), including pollution, environmental monitoring, human pressures, impacts, etc.; (v) structural parameters (6.6%) such as abundance,richness,diversity;(vi)climate change (3.4%); (vii) ecology (3.4%); (viii) systems management (3.2%); (ix) genetic FIGURE 1 | Number of manuscripts published under the term: “marine ecosystem,” appearing in the abstract, title or keywords, since 1970, within the Science Citation Index journal (consulted in SCOPUS, on 17th November 2013). and genomic issues (1.6%); (x) protection (1%); (xi) ecosystem modeling (0.9%); and (xii) others (4.5%).