Sentinel Islands

Climate change (global warming, sea level rise, anthropogenic pressure, invasive species) is expected to cause huge modifications to our environment during the next few years. On top of concerns over social and sanitary risks, the impacts on the biodiversity and the ecosystem functioning are badly understood and potential catastrophic.
The first symptoms are already apparent : loss of diversity, decline in marine resources, costal modification and erosion, ecosystems and habitats degradation and transformation, rising sea-water temperature and its effect on thermophilic/phobic species, animal and plant invasive species and their impacts on the native species.
Islands, because of their size and limited complexity, are ideal wildlife laboratories to monitor the impact of global change on biodiversity.
That's why we have devided to select about twenty sentinel islands located across the whole western basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Studies of physico-chemical and biological parameters using methodologies that have been careful adapted to every site, will allow a better understanding these processes, and changes over the coming decades to be monitored.

« Islands are the barometers of international ecological politics. The entire world will see its success or its failure, first of all, on our islands. » James A. Michel, President of the Seychelles since 2004.