Researchers push forward project for monitoring climate change impact in Mexico's coastal ecosystems

Climate change has seriously affected Mexican coastlines and researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) proposed a project to monitor key locations that represent some of the most characteristic national coastal ecosystems.

The experts have noticed that the increase in temperature affects the living beings in those places and some species are emigrating to survive, they said on Saturday.

The project aims to create an integrated database that includes the new generated information, historic results and useful sedimentary registers in order to preserve these environments.

The database will be known as "Tulum" as it evokes a place that represented an important role in marine passage and the Maya peoples, said Joan Albert Sanchez Cabeza, researcher in UNAM's Physics Institute.

As an example of the effort, the Coastal Observatory in Mazatlan, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, has been in operation since 2013 with the aim of identifying and quantifying the impact of this phenomenon in the Sinaloa area through determining indicators such as surface temperature and salinity, sea level and oxygen dissolved in the ocean.

The observatory is also studying the sediment cores with the purpose of rebuilding the impacts of global change in the past.

This project seeks to generate data and information in the long run in order to determine alteration trends in Mexico's coastlines.

"In a decade we could be able to see how important this data is," said Sanchez Cabeza.

At the conference on "Coastal Observatories of Global and Climate Change," the researcher said that, up until now, it has been detected that the studied areas face different problems, such as increasing temperature which affects the creatures that live in the area.

"Faced with this situation, some species migrate north to survive, but those that can't move will disappear. For example, several types of algae are no longer there and the lionfish has come from the equator to Mexican shores in search of an adequate temperature. During the events of El Nino the coral has been majorly whitened and killed," said Sanchez Cabeza.

Another worrying aspect is the sea level which has increased by three or four millimeters per year. If this continues, in one century it will have grown by 30 or 40 centimeters.

Also, it is worth mentioning the issue of hypoxia (shortage of oxygen) in the sea which, although it is a natural phenomenon in some areas, has increased in coastlines due to human activity.

Finally, due to the increase in carbon dioxide (CO2), sea water is becoming more acidic. This brings serious consequences, for example, along the coast that goes from Canada to Baja California Sur in Mexico, some species of molluscs, such as scallops and abalones, have decreased. Enditem