Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Anthropogenic pressure (habitat destruction, chemical contamination, eutrophication) has deep deleterious effects on coastal aquatic ecosystems whose production is of major importance for humans. Ongoing climate changes are expected to generate in a next future unexperienced, stressful environmental conditions which will probably deeply affect biota in targeted habitat as estuaries. These habitats are naturally highly variable, both spatially and temporally. Such environmental condi-tions make them highly exposed to synergistic effects of pollution and temperature stress. At the basis of the trophic chain, benthic invertebrates, by producing a huge amount of biomass, control ecosystem production and should now be considered as populations at risk.IPOC aims to provide the scientific community and environmental managers with an improved ""tool-kit"", based on original scientific knowledge, for assessing biological effects of the combined action of the main anthropogenic stressors of aquatic environments, pollution and climatic changes. IPOC scientific rationale relies on a better understanding of the sensitivity of sentinel species in the continuum freshwater to marine environment and thus their vulnerability to targeted stressors. The approach combining observation and experimentation will allow to:- characterize the temporal evolution of the health status of invertebrate populations by measuring a selection of biological responses at the individual level through an innovative battery of molecular, cellular and physiological markers;- foresee the capacity of populations at risk to maintain themselves in an environment altered by global change;- propose an operational basis for scientific programs to allow further long-term monitoring according to OSPAR recommen-dations;