Pas d'enregistrements
Ana Rita Silva
2022
TERRA - Climate change impacTs in EstaRRejA region
Although great efforts have been made over the last years, climate change continues to impact our planet. According to IPCC predictions, atmospheric CO2 levels and mean temperature are expected to continue rising jointly with the frequency/intensity/duration of extreme weather events (e.g., droughts and floods). The impact of climate change may be exacerbated in metal(loid)-contaminated areas, such as the Estarreja municipality, where ecosystems have been under stress for decades. TERRA aims to understand the effects of climate change alterations on the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, using contaminated soils from Estarreja. For that, extreme climate events/predicted climate change scenarios (including changes in combined climate factors according to IPCC) will be simulated to evaluate their effects on the ecotoxicity in terrestrial and aquatic inhabitants. Moreover, soil/water properties, e.g. pH, metal(loid) content, soil organic carbon, will be evaluated to establish the link between soil/water properties and effects under changing climate factors. Considering that extreme climate events have been reported in the last years in Portugal, the project intends to understand the dynamics behind contamination in this region after these events, by evaluating contamination level in Estarreja region five years later (by comparing with previous works). TERRA will provide crucial data for Portugal and worldwide regarding the consequences of climate changes in contaminated areas. The present project will also promote an easy and active communication with the society, with the final aim of increasing awareness about climate change and its environmental impacts.
Hugo Vieira
2019
Modelling mercury remobilization and transport in Ria de Aveiro: Effects of Climate Change, extreme and dredging events
An important issue today is to understand in what extent cycling of mercury in the future may be altered in regard to Climate Change. Predictions imply that most of the parameters that determine the global mercury cycle today will change. Laranjo bay (Ria de Aveiro) received, during five decades, a large amount of mercury from a highly contaminated chlor-alkali plant effluent discharge from the industrial Estarreja complex. Due to natural remediation processes, in which layers of less contaminated particles overlap with contaminated sediment, most of the mercury released to the lagoon has been trapped in the deeper layers of sediments. Natural and extreme events, Climate Change, or man-made events (dredging activities of the outlet channel will be conducted in the lagoon) can play an important role in the mercury distribution in Ria de Aveiro, since they may promote the remobilization from the deeper layers of sediment to the water column. Under the extreme events and Climate Change scenarios, detailed information on mercury remobilization and transport in Ria de Aveiro is critical to understand the environmental cycling of mercury and relevant for the development of cost-efficient strategies towards reducing the negative impacts of this metal. This study will provide valuable information on the remobilization and transport of mercury from the historically most contaminated area towards adjacent areas of the lagoon, not only through field monitoring but also through modelling, in a Climate Change scenario (four distinct hydrodynamic scenarios), in order to build a prediction procedure contributing to mitigate future disturbances.
María Nazaret González Alcaraz
2018
MICROCLIM - Effects of global warming on microbial populations from contaminated agricultural soils in the area of Estarreja
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts increasing air temperatures and decreasing soil moisture content, the soils being among the most affected components of terrestrial ecosystems, especially in anthropogenic-contaminated areas. Soil microorganisms are key players in terrestrial ecosystem functions and services, quickly responding to environmental stresses. MICROCLIM aims to assess how microbial populations of agricultural soils affected by the contamination derived from the Estarreja Chemical Complex may be affected under the current global warming perspective, by using changes at structural and functional level. The specific objectives are: 1) assessing structural and functional changes in microbial populations of contaminated agricultural soils induced by single climate factors (soil moisture content and air temperature and their relation to changes in soil chemical and physicochemical parameters, and 2) assessing structural and functional changes in microbial populations of contaminated agricultural soils under different climate change scenarios, simulated by climate factors combinations (soil moisture content and air temperature), and their relation to changes in soil chemical and physicochemical parameters. Climate factors ranges will be established based on the emission scenarios predicted by the IPCC by 2100. The project will rely on changes in soil microbial populations at structural (bacterial community phylogenetic composition) and functional (microbial metabolic activity) level and their relation to key soil parameters (pH, organic matter, metal(loi) availability). MICROCLIM will improve the capacity to predict the consequences of global warming in soil microbiota from anthropogenic-contaminated soils, which, in turn, will enable a better preservation and sustainability of soil ecosystem functions and services.
