Coinciding with the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Professor Ramón Margalef, a highly distinguished and globally recognized ecologist, takes place the 1st Iberian Ecological Society Meeting from 4 to 7 February 2019 at the University of Barcelona. The conference is aimed to be the kickoff of SIBECOL (Sociedad Ibérica de Ecología), a new scientific society, joining ecologists from Iberian countries, whatever the system or approach they work on. The Asociación Española de Ecología Terrestre (AEET), the Asociación Ibérica de Limnologia (AIL), the Sociedad Española de Etología y Ecología Evolutiva (SEEEE) and the Sociedade Portuguesa de Ecologia (SPECO), as well as a group of Iberian Marine Ecologists, support this initiative. The conference concurs with the XIV AEET Meeting “Ecology: an integrative science in the Anthropocene”.

The conference addresses the great transdisciplinary and integrative background of Ecology. The objective of the meeting is to highlight those crosscutting ecological concepts shared by the different branches of this discipline (limnology, marine ecology, terrestrial ecology, theoretical ecology), regardless of the study system. The organizers seek to exchange ideas and approaches that are common to different specialties in Ecology, and to provide a platform to discuss how ecological sciences can help to deal with the huge environmental transformations induced by human societies.

Within this context, Aina Barcelona, Jordi Colomer and Teresa Serra participate in the SIBECOL 2019 with the presentation of the poster entitled “Allochthon sediment trapped by flexible canopies under oscillatory flows”.

In this study, the members of the Environmental Physics research group point out that seagrass beds are known as ecosystems engineers for their ability to modify the local hydrodynamic conditions and their important role protecting the shorelines. They reduce sediment resuspension and increase sediment retention stabilizing the bed absorbing the kinetic energy. In consequence, they play a critical role improving the water quality. Although the sediment resuspension was found to decrease as a flexible canopy density increase, the effect of the flexible canopy density on trapping allochthon sediment is still poorly understood. A total of 40 experiments were designed to determine the trapping of allochthon sediment depending on the density of the flexible canopy on an oscillatory flow. The aims of this work are (1) determining the variations of suspended sediment concentration within a canopy for different canopy densities, and (2) determining the sediment trapped by plants. Laboratory experiments were carried out in a flume using five different flexible canopy densities (955, 637, 318, 127 and 0 plants·m^-2), eight waves amplitudes (1.2, 1.5, 2.0, 2.2, 4.5, 4.7, 5.0, 5.6 cm) and two different frequencies (0.7 and 1.2 Hz). This work shows that allochthon sediment within a canopy increases linearly with the TKE. Whereas, the suspended sediment above the canopy was constant in all the cases. In addition, slight differences were observed by the sediment trapped by each individual plant in canopies with different densities, therefore the canopy density does not influence the trapping by each individual plant.

This research is conducted within the framework of the “Water Quality and Particles Transport” research line, and of the FragmentUm project.