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 which finally evolved into a structured knowledge and a field of endless intellectual activity and discover.

My early research concerned submersed aquatic vegetation, and my PhD focussed 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 and, at some moment of my personal history, I decided to expand conceptually, albeit restricting to a limited number of ecosystem-types. My last five years of research should be viewed as a part of a history of curiosity and repeated attempts to understand our environment from as many points of view as possible. Moreover, it should be taken in mind that one of my priorities has been to build and consolidate an active and balanced research group.

To summarise my recent research, I consider representative the following ítems:

- 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, defence mechanisms previously disregarded, complex interactions involving other actors, such as epiphytes and the possible controls on herbivore abundance (predation, larval-supply, recruitment bottlenecks).

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