⚠️ Plastic pollution doesn't stay where it originates. By moving between habitats, gulls can act as plastic biovectors, transferring waste from polluted areas to breeding colonies. Understanding these routes can help us better assess the ecological impacts of plastic pollution.

🗝️ The results revealed marked differences in plastic transport between habitats: urban gulls were estimated to transport roughly 10 times more plastic to their breeding areas than inland gulls, highlighting the influence of habitat use on plastic transfer across ecosystems.

🔬 The study combined plastic debris analysis in gull pellets with GPS tracking data from 27 breeding yellow-legged gulls to investigate how spatial behaviour and habitat use shape plastic exposure and assess the role of gulls in transferring plastic pollution across ecosystems.

The Levantine-Balearic marine demarcation will serve as a pilot case. By combining ecological, fisheries, socioeconomic and environmental data, MARVEL & MARVEL-TOOLS will support integrated conservation planning & help identify priority areas while considering socioeconomic costs

🌡️ A key innovation is the integration of climate change into spatial conservation planning. MARVEL adds an 8th criterion—environmental stability—to the 7 EBSA criteria, helping identify areas better able to maintain stable conditions under climate change.

How can we identify the areas where marine conservation can deliver the greatest benefits? MARVEL & MARVEL-TOOLS aim to develop a quantitative, reproducible & updatable approach to identify priority areas for biodiversity conservation and the ecosystem services that depend on it.

🎣🌡️ By exploring scenarios combining fishing, climate change and spatial management, food-web models can help uncover effects that remain hidden when species are considered in isolation and support more realistic projections of how marine ecosystems may change.

📊 From empirical trophic data and ecological networks to quantitative and spatially explicit ecosystem models, Dr Marta Coll showed how combining food-web dynamics with environmental conditions and human pressures can reveal ecological interdependencies and trade-offs.

🐟 In her plenary talk, “Who Eats Whom-and Why It Matters”, Dr Marta Coll explored how food-web models can help us understand the complex dynamics of marine ecosystems and how ecological changes propagate across species, habitats and trophic levels.

From bird behaviour to fishing maps. Over 24 months, we will: 📌 Harmonise data 📌Identify fishing-related behavioural signatures associated to fishing 📌Apply models to African migratory tracks 📌Combine results with satellite vessel detections and global fishing effort products

🐦📡 A new perspective: Audouin’s gulls as biological sensors of fishing activity. GPS transmitters and accelerometers will track their movements and behaviour, helping identify interactions with vessels in European waters and apply them along Africa’s coast during migration.

🌊 Fishing for alternatives means opening the door to other forms of knowledge and governance: local experience, participation and bottom-up approaches alongside scientific expertise and policy. The goal? Sustainable fisheries and sustainable coastal communities.

🔍 The way we define a problem determines the solutions we look for. Prof Dr Linke showed how policy frameworks such as Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) influence what knowledge is considered relevant and asked whether fisheries governance could be framed differently.

🐟 Despite decades of scientific advice, overfishing and stock depletion persist. Why? Using Baltic cod and herring as examples, Prof Dr Linke looked beyond the numbers to examine how current science-policy interactions shape the way fisheries problems are understood and managed.