Editorial: Ocean acidification in Latin America
Editorial: Ocean acidification in Latin America
Source: Frontiers
Ocean acidification is among the most significant threats to marine ecosystems worldwide, with profound implications for biodiversity, food security, and coastal economies (Gattuso et al., 2023). The Latin American region, with its vast coastline (approximately 59,960 km) and productive marine areas, hosts some of the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems, including those in the Humboldt Current, the Tropical West Atlantic, the Pacific Central-American Coastal regions, the Gulf of California and the Southwest Atlantic. These ecosystems are critical to livelihoods and climate regulation, supporting diverse habitats such as coral reefs, mangroves, salt marshes, sandy beaches and kelp forests. However, they face significant threats from pollution, degradation, and are particularly vulnerable to changes in ocean chemistry. The studies compiled in this Research Topic of Frontiers in Marine Science provide crucial, up-to-date evidence on the complex interactions between global climate forcings and intricate local oceanographic variability, as well as their impacts on economically and ecologically important species, providing a detailed, multidimensional picture of the region’s specific vulnerabilities and resilience mechanisms. This editorial summarizes the 11 studies in this Research Topic, highlighting the advances in understanding OA in Latin America.
2 Synthesis of the Research Topic: an integrated vision of regional research
The research compiled in this Research Topic reveals a mature, multidimensional scientific landscape, where diverse methodological approaches, geographical regions, and biological groups intertwine to offer a more comprehensive understanding of ocean acidification in Latin America. The emerging body of work shows a scientific community successfully transitioning from specific descriptive studies initiated in the early 21st century toward integrative research that captures the complexity of the phenomenon and its underlying physical, chemical, and biological mechanisms.
This methodological evolution manifests through three complementary approaches that constitute the backbone of regional research. High-resolution environmental monitoring in the Colombian and Mexican Pacific has captured the variability of the carbonate system at daily and seasonal scales, while observational programs have been established in critical ecosystems such as Caribbean rhodolith beds. In parallel, controlled experimentation has generated fundamental knowledge of physiological stress response mechanisms, ranging from biochemical adaptations in Antarctic mollusks to differential tolerance in infaunal bivalves subjected to combined acidification and food limitation. Complementing these approaches, the advanced statistical modeling developed for the Gulf of Mexico represents a qualitative leap by enabling the spatial reconstruction of acidification parameters using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, overcoming the limitations of traditional sampling.
Cont'd.
LINK:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2025.1760804/full