Science and Innovation

We share this interview published by Disseny Hub Barcelona following the talk on biodiversity in the Mediterranean basin and its importance that Jordina Belmonte gave at the El Clot-Josep Benet Library.

Jordina Belmonte is an aerobiologist, a branch of biology that studies organic particles in the air. Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), she is a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and president of the Catalan Institution of Natural History. She is also an Honorary Member of the College of Environmentalists of Catalonia and a researcher for the citizen science project Plant*tes – Urban flora and allergies, will you help?, attached to the Citizen Science Office of Barcelona. The conversation revolves around a space as biodiverse as the Mediterranean basin, artificial intelligence (AI) applied to biology and the quality of the air in our city.

The Barcelona Library Network invited you to give a talk on the biodiversity of the Mediterranean basin. Who are its inhabitants? What species do they share this habitat with?

The Mediterranean territories (land and water) are highly biodiverse. In fact, they are the most biodiverse in Europe (compared to Central and Northern Europe) and North Africa. The current climate and that of historical times has made possible the existence of environments with very varied environmental conditions populated by a multitude of animal, plant and fungal organisms.

Some of the areas of the ICTA-UAB study the interactions of human societies and the mechanisms that act on global change. Do we influence the habitats of Mediterranean species?

I am not a specialist in this subject, but it is known that human societies (with very few exceptions and not found in the Mediterranean environment) act very strongly on their environment. With our way of life, living in a territory, moving around, manufacturing, transporting, leisure activities… we contribute to the alteration of natural environmental processes and contribute to global change. All habitats (terrestrial and aquatic) are being affected by human activity.

Some species end up adapting to their environment, which ones would you choose?

A very difficult question to answer if we are talking about the Mediterranean, because of the vastness of the territory and the great diversity of organisms that live there! Bacteria are able to make rapid modifications and adapt to new environments… This leads us to think that, in general, the smaller the organisms are and the higher their reproduction rates, the more they are able to fix in their genome characteristics that allow them to adapt to a changing environment. But there are also very large and very old species in which the metabolism is very slow to change, and they too can withstand the changing environment. I could highlight one plant, the Ramonda myconi, which has been present in Catalonia since the Tertiary period. The living conditions and habitat (small crevices in calcareous rocks) have allowed it to survive from the Pyrenees to the Ports de Tortosa, and may it continue to do so for many more eras to come!

700 tonnes of plastic waste pollute the Mediterranean every day, so it is a threatened sea. As a scientist, what processes or characteristics should materials have when producing new products in order to minimise these threats?

We should ensure that everything we produce is subsequently decomposed and reintegrated into nature. Another option is to reuse it or turn it into a new product. This is what happens in nature, where, if we think in terms of organisms, everything is cyclical. You stop being alive, and you decompose, either by a natural process or because you have been consumed by some organism bigger than you…

Your speciality is aerobiology, the science that studies the biological components of air. What do the inhabitants of Barcelona and its metropolitan area breathe?

When we talk about aerobiology, we are mainly referring to microscopic particles, so we can’t see them with the naked eye unless for some reason they accumulate in large quantities. We could also talk about butterflies, bees, birds… But nowadays, the concept is used more for what we can identify by looking through a microscope. In Barcelona’s air there is a multitude of pollen grains and fungal spores (I’ve been studying them for 40 years!), along with micro-arthropods (especially mites) and bacteria. Throughout the year, the species vary, because they have different needs, such as environmental temperature, precipitation… Because we live in a place, what we breathe the most is what is closest to us, but it has also been shown that air currents transport all these tiny particles with great efficiency, so that sometimes in Barcelona we are also breathing pollen and spores that arrive from France, Germany, Eastern Europe… or from the Sahara (episodes of Saharan dust). In short, air is like water: it mixes everything it contains. It’s an exciting world, I could talk for hours!

How has the incorporation of new technologies and AI influenced air quality research, and what do the studies reveal?

If we talk about biological air quality (pollens, spores and others), new technologies and AI are just starting to be applied lately and there is still a lot of work to be done, but it is very interesting, because they will make possible something that in other fields has already been achieved. I mean, not too many years ago (or is 40 too many?), when I was starting to do research, weather data was taken manually…. Now there are a multitude of automatic recording stations that allow us to see within seconds of each other what the temperature is. Well, nowadays, when we study the pollens and spores in the air, we observe them one by one under the microscope, and we look inside our heads or consult books to see which organism they belong to, then we write it down, and so we count them all. Palynological art! But we are already starting to work on training machines that some engineers are developing to know how to do this job of recognising biological particles in the air… And everything will come! Give us some time to continue collaborating, and soon we will be able to report in real time what biological particles are in the air.