With support from TotalEnergies Foundation over three years, the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) is leading a research project that aims to explore microbial biodiversity in mangroves, which are essential ecosystems. Over the last few years, their protection worldwide has become a major ecological, economic and societal challenge.
The aim of the project, named ADELE (Microbiomes in mAngroves: a hotspot of bioDiversity yet to be ExpLorEd), is to inventory the invisible biodiversity in mangroves, which are of great natural value and offer multiple ecosystemic services (habitat for fauna, coastal protection, carbon sequestration, water quality, etc.).
The micro-organisms studied by the ADELE project are of vital importance to the way mangroves develop and are much more diverse than the macro-organisms (crustaceans, fish, mollusks, worms, etc.). Though overlooked for a long time, micro-organisms are now in the limelight owing to the multiple biological and ecological roles they play in the development of mangrove ecosystems and the way in which they contribute to the health of humans and local fauna.
The purpose of the research work lead by the IRD is to focus on three mangrove areas in the world (French Guiana, Senegal and Vietnam) that have very different biological, physical and chemical conditions, to draw up a massive inventory, as exhaustive as possible, of the microbial diversity in these ecosystems. The main targets of the inventory include the water, sediments and main local aquatic organisms (e.g. mangrove trees, crustaceans, mollusks, fish, nematodes and amphibians). The aim is to identify the main environmental determinants of the rich biodiversity. It is a pioneering, cross-functional project that brings together very different fields of research such as microbiology, geochemistry, benthology, botanics and genomics.
The project is part of TotalEnergies Foundation’s remit involving actions to contribute to the development and sharing of knowledge on the biodiversity of coastal areas and oceans.