Sierra Nevada becomes the referent of climatic change in Europe

The Continental pelagic trophyc networks group belonging to the Department of Animal Biology and Ecology of the Faculty of Sciences, University of Granada, has been studying for 25 years the ecosystem of Sierra Nevada. This research group, with Presentación Carrilla Lechuga, analyses since the seventies how this “ecosystem, unique in the world, suffers climatic changes not only caused by aerosols from Sahara. We can see here things that you can not study in the rest of Europe, since Sierra Nevada is more similar to Antarctica than the rest of Europe”.

This kind of research makes it possible that Sierra Nevada becomes the sensor of the climatic change in the rest of the Continent. “We develop natural records of the processes that are happening and they allow us to make suppositions on changes in nutrient concentration or the density of certain species”. For these researchers, Sierra Nevada is a natural laboratory to study “how species derive profit from adversity”. That is the case of some organisms which can withstand solar radiation; they have managed to adapt to large temperature changes and studying them we can obtain sun protectors for humans deriving profit from these adaptation systems. “They are already doing it with macro-algae in Malaga”.

Further information:
Presentación Carrillo Lechuga.
Department of Animal Biology and Ecology. Faculty of Sciences.
Phone number: 958 246166.
E-mail:pcl@goliat.ugr.es