The Ecology Laboratory, responsible for part of WP1, is at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEyN) of the National University of Mar del Plata (UNMDP). This University is one of the four largest Universities of Argentina, located in the northern coastal area of this country at the city of Mar del Plata. In terms of natural resources, this University is the one with the largest involvement in marine and coastal resources. The FCEyN offers doctoral degrees in Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Biology, and most of the theses are related to marine sciences. Given these activities, it is well equipped to carry out frontline research in these areas.

The Ecology Laboratory (Prof. Ph.D. Oscar Iribarne) focuses on questions related to the structure and function of SW Atlantic salt marsh ecosystems and coastal embayment, including predation, competition, ecosystem engineering, herbivory, effect on sediment dynamics, food webs and nutrient cycling. The final purpose is to provide basic information for management and conservation. The approaches of our studies are from small-scale experiments to large-scale ecosystem studies. We work from basic biology to descriptive and experimental ecology, and use advanced techniques such as molecular techniques, stable isotopes analysis and satellite image analysis. Our projects have been supported by competitive sources including the International Foundation for Science (IFS, Sweden), National Geographic Research and Exploration Grants (USA), Fundación Antorchas, CONICET (Argentina), Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL, Woods Hole, USA), Institute of Ecosystem Studies (IES, NY, USA), SHELL (Argentina), Pearcy Sladen Memorial Fund (USA), Lerner Gray Fund for Marine Research (USA), BMBF (Germany) and UNESCO-Loreal. We keep close cooperation with the MBL, the Department of Evolutionary Ecology at Brown University (USA), the IES and the Alfred Wegener Institute (Germany). In all cases, the cooperation is through the exchange and/or co-direction of students. Since the starting of the activities of this laboratory (1995) we have been publishing more than 60 papers in internationally recognized journals (e.g., CJFAS, Ecology, MEPS, JEMBE, Estuaries, ECSS, Oikos, Oecologia, ESPL, MB, MPB, JSR, BMS), several book chapters and two books. Within this laboratory 16 students have completed their Licenciature theses (degree equivalent to a US non-thesis Master; there are 3 now), 7 have completed their Doctoral Thesis (there are 8 doctoral student now) and there have been 4 post doctoral students (there are 2 now). All students have been supported by the most competitive Argentinean scholarship, the one from the National Council of Scientific Research and Technology (CONICET). Our results have shown that the SW Atlantic estuarine ecosystem area is different from other similar ecosystems given that their intertidal areas are dominated by a large bioturbator crab Chasmagnathus granulata. This species affects the community structure, the marsh plants dynamics, the detritus dynamics and the biogeochemical processes. Indirectly, the crabs positively affect the razor clam Tagelus plebeius (unexpected in an interaction between a deposit feeder and a filter feeder). Crabs also affect the habitat use of migratory shorebirds. Shorebirds that migrate to the southern hemisphere avoid the crab-inhabited area while species that spend the year round in the south prefer the crab-inhabited area. Fishes are also differentially affected by the presence of the crab beds. However, the most interesting effect is that a large amount of detritus that otherwise would be exported from the marsh is retained in the crab beds. Thus, we showed why paradigms of export-import process in estuarine habitats might not work in SW Atlantic estuaries dominated by large burrowing species.

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