Coastal areas are being adversely influenced by key drivers of change (e.g. habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, diseases, invasive species) that force natural populations to adapt to novel environmental conditions. The European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, 2008/56/EC), Biodiversity Strategy (EC, 2012) and Regulation on Invasive Alien Species (EC, 2014) recognize the establishment and spread of Non-Indigenous Species (NIS) as one of the major threats to European biodiversity and ecosystem health. As they may disrupt biotic interactions, monitoring abundance and state of invasive species and their environmental impact on native ecosystems is critical to achieve the goals of MSFD by 2020 and needs to be a requisite for marine conservation management. Furthermore, by interacting with climate change and other components of global change such as anthropogenic pollution, invasive species may have unexpected effects on marine ecosystems. These challenges require a more integrated approach by focusing on the mechanistic assessment of these combined effects along coastal trophic chains. It is vital
to evaluate these pressures, as
these changes tend to increase in the near future, and they can be additive, synergistic or antagonistic. Including community ecology is vital for the understanding and prediction of multiple stressors in natural ecosystems. Such studies can analyze if these factors when acting alone or combined may not only directly alter species abundance, behavior and physiology but also indirectly affect species interactions and ecosystem functioning. Multifactorial experiments will be performed taking into account key coastal species representing distinct trophic levels and different levels of biological organization. By focusing on multiple stressors in natural populations in a global change context, this project will provide advanced scientific basis for an integrative assessment covering various interacting stressors that might influence species response towards global change, being essential for effective environmental conservation strategies.