HIGHLIGHTS RESEARCH
“From Rivers to the Ocean: Science for a Changing Territory” was the motto that brought together, on July 6th and 7th, more than 100 researchers and other stakeholders at the University of Algarve, in Faro, for the 2nd ARNET Meeting. Over two days, one idea was transversal: that the knowledge produced by MARE, CIMA, and CBMA truly fulfills its purpose when it reaches those who decide on the territory, be they municipalities, public agencies, or civil society organizations.
Science at the Service of the Territory
The tone was set right from the opening, and it couldn’t have been more direct. André Pacheco, vice-director of ARNET and director of CIMA, the host institution, opened the meeting by naming the urgent issues facing the country today: “The theme that brings us together could not be more relevant: climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, extreme events, and the transition to a sustainable blue economy are challenges that demand increasingly integrated responses.” It was this challenge that Pedro Raposo de Almeida, director of ARNET and MARE, summarized in one sentence: “Science must be the engine of decision-making, and not just a repository of knowledge.” Cláudia Pascoal, vice-director of ARNET and director of CBMA, highlighted the scale that the network has already reached, with researchers spread throughout the country, from Minho to Algarve.
The University of Algarve, through its vice-rector Patrícia Pinto, raised the same challenge, but outside the network: “we need more bridges to knowledge, bridges between researchers and decision-makers themselves, bridges between our university and society,” an idea reinforced by Cristiano Cabrita, vice-president of CCDR Algarve, who acknowledged the difficulty that “public policy does not always manage to incorporate scientific knowledge well, whether due to distance or lack of knowledge on the part of those who decide.”
From Research to Decision-Making
The link between research and decision-making was discussed throughout the meeting, with contributions from participants from various organizations. Catarina Grilo, from WWF Portugal, offered a perspective from outside academia: she reminded the audience that science “is one of the contributions, but not the only one” in political decisions, where factors such as the social acceptance of solutions are particularly important, and highlighted the role of NGOs in building this bridge between research and decision-makers with an agility that the former do not always possess.
From the public administration side, this same desire for closer collaboration was evident, with Inês Alves, from the Portuguese Environment Agency, summarizing it in a direct sentence: “Faced with an increasingly complex reality, decisions must be based on solid and up-to-date knowledge. Decision-making depends on knowledge.” Miguel Miranda (AIR Centre) and Gonçalo Duarte Gomes (ICNF) raised the challenges of balancing the blue economy and conservation, and the importance of recovering the direct involvement of local communities in land management.
Valentina Calixto, from the Faro City Council, argued that the direct involvement of the population continues to make a difference in decisions about the territory, citing as an example the public participation process for the A22 motorway, which resulted in many changes to accommodate the interests of the population. Teresa Cruz (MARE) gave the most complete example of this bridge between science, decision-making and society, presenting the history of the first co-management committee for a fishery in Portugal: that of the barnacle, created in 2021 in the Berlengas Nature Reserve, based on “many years of interactions between scientists and shellfish gatherers.”
Communication, Services, and Data: The Network’s Tools
The meeting also dedicated space to the tools that support ARNET’s networking. Vera Sequeira (MARE) presented the trajectory of the Communication group, now more visible than two years ago, and set a challenge for the future: to go beyond social media, towards more strategic communication, capable of coherently translating ARNET’s role in bridging science, politics, and action.
João Paulo Medeiros (MARE) presented the ARNET Services Platform, whose objective is to gather in a validated catalog the scientific services that the network’s centers can offer to external entities, from environmental monitoring to laboratory tests.
Joana Boavida-Portugal (MARE) presented the ARNET DataHub, created in 2022 to gather the scientific data produced by the various units of the network. This work gained new momentum in 2025 with the partnership established with CoLab +Atlantic, through the creation of an interface capable of cross-referencing data from numerical models with measurements collected in the field, by buoys, stations, and genetic tools.
An expanded program
The meeting also included a wide range of other presentations, highlighting the risks of coastal erosion and flooding in Faro and the Mondego River, saline intrusion in the Guadiana estuary, the management of protected areas in the Algarve, low-cost molecular tools for biodiversity monitoring, the biotechnological potential of macroalgae, and the challenges of deep-sea mining and marine spatial planning in the face of climate change. Regarding plastic pollution in Portuguese rivers, Giorgio Pace (CBMA) issued a challenge: to create a national observatory dedicated to this topic, extending to other units in the network the work that has been done by CBMA.
The meeting ended with a note of confidence in the future of the network. André Pacheco pointed out that the success of these two days was not by chance, but the result of a common goal: “When we are all working together towards this goal, we manage to create something quite special here, which shows that ARNET can function as a network.”
Text: Vera Sequeira
Photos: Érica Silva
