Charlotte Underwood1, Thomas Davies1, Elena Maggi2
1University of Plymouth, UK - 2University of Pisa, Italy
Natural light and soundscapes play an essential role in aquatic life, from guiding settlement behaviour to impacting foraging activity to coordinating reproductive events. The dramatic increase in anthropogenic light and noise around the globe has caused significant behavioural and physiological changes in a wide range of marine and freshwater species. While the understanding around the ecological impacts of light and noise pollution (LNP) has grown substantially over the last few decades, there has yet to be a coordinated consensus for the best methods of prevention and mitigation. AquaPLAN is an interdisciplinary, European-wide project aimed at tackling the issues related to sensory pollutants by quantifying the impacts of LNP across the continent’s lakes, rivers, and seas. The University of Plymouth’s participation in this programme will focus on the long-term impacts of LNP on biodiversity across rocky intertidal shores by monitoring species abundances and distributions over a minimum of three years at key sites around Plymouth Sound that exhibit varying levels of LNP. In addition, lab-based experiments will quantify minimum threshold exposures to artificial light at night (ALAN) that elicit behavioural responses in representative invertebrate species commonly found in European seas. This will contribute to AquaPLAN’s long-term goal of developing empirically robust strategies for monitoring and mitigating LNP in aquatic habitats, which will inform UK and EU policy regarding its management.
Biography
Charlotte Underwood is a Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth. She joined the AquaPLAN team in 2024, after completing her doctorate on the impacts of artificial light at night on gammarid crustaceans at the University of Southampton. Her research interests focus on monitoring and mitigating the impacts of anthropogenic stressors in marine habitats.