My main interest in research can be summarized into a single word: Ecology. I was fascinated by ecology probably much in advance that I knew the name of something that was first a confuse feeling, then a passion and which finally evolved into a structured knowledge and a field of endless intellectual activity and discovery.

My early research concerned submersed aquatic vegetation, and my PhD focused on seagrass meadows. I soon realized that these ecosystems offered optimal opportunities to explore a wide variety of views and concepts within the vast universe of ecology. From then, my research has been devoted at exploring topics covering a wide array of ecological issues using seagrasses as ecosystem models. My research life is a history of curiosity and repeated attempts to understand our environment from as many points of view as possible.

To summarize my recent research, I consider representative the following items:

• Eco-physiological aspects of plant-nutrients interaction, and on how such kind of basic phenomena propagates to higher levels of biological hierarchy (population, community)


• Biotic, community-level interactions, including the re-evaluation of grazing, wrongly considered as being of marginal significance in seagrass meadows, defense mechanisms of plants, complex interactions involving other players, such as epiphytes, and the possible controls on herbivore abundance (predation, larval-supply, recruitment bottlenecks)


• Landscape ecology in shallow water ecosystems, resilience and hysteresis in benthic vegetation and the effects of global warming


• Developing tools for environmental quality assessment, including biotic quality indexes and other issues related to human impacts in the coastal zone.