About this Research Topic

Background

The coastal area is important to the land-sea interface zone and is quite sensitive to the perturbation by intensive human activities and climate change. Coastal zones are dramatically stressed by rapid population growth, highly intensive industrial aggregation, and natural change. The coastal environmental pollution has degraded water quality, resulting in highly undesirable conditions in ecosystem structure and function. Recognizing these environmental issues and drafting relevant management policies are important for sustainable socio-economic development. Therefore, long-term or short-term ecological monitoring networks have been established in some coastal areas to evaluate eutrophication and other environmental problems such as harmful algal blooms (HABs), organic pollutants, microplastics, heavy metal pollution, and their biomagnifications, as measuring hydrochemical variables and biological indicators in the marine environment will facilitate a better understanding of the aquatic environment. On the other hand, estuarine and coastal (jointly termed coastal) ecosystems are also affected by climatic change and associated perturbations, including droughts, hurricanes, and floods. Therefore, understanding how human-induced and natural changes affect biodiversity, environmental change, mangroves, seagrasses, and coral reefs in estuarine and coastal ecosystems is a major challenge for research and management.

To address the scientific need for the coastal ecosystem influenced by anthropogenic activities and natural changes, we focus on the advances in coastal macroecology. Firstly, with the help of the growing number of coastal water monitoring projects, huge datasets are collected and would give a better understanding of the impacts of anthropogenic activities and natural changes on coastal water environments. Secondly, the mangrove, seagrass and coral reefs in coastal ecosystems are subjected to stressful situations such as temperature change, salinity, water mixing, and human activities. It is important to know how these biological species are growing. Third, how these ecosystems change under the ocean-land orientation has also been of high research interest.

The aim of this Research Topic is to explore changes in coastal ecosystems, with an emphasis on the macroecology of coastal zone under land-ocean interactions. The following subtopics will be included, but are not limited to

1. Macroecological studies of coastal ecosystems which are stressed by land-ocean interactions under both land-oceans and ocean-land orientation, such as human activities, oceanic, or atmospheric sources.
2. Coastal macroecology investigated with ecological monitoring networks and chemical parameters.
3. Coastal environmental and biogeological changes discussed under a large chemical and biological-based data set

Keywords: human activity, natural change, mangrove, seagrass, nutrient biogeochemistry

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