Carlos Manuel Duarte is a marine ecologist conducting research on marine ecosystems globally, from polar to the tropical ocean and from near-shore to deep-sea ecosystems. His research addresses biodiversity in the oceans, the impacts of human activity on marine ecosystems, and the capacity of marine ecosystems to recover from these impacts. He is also interested in transdisciplinary research, collaborating with scientists and engineers across a broad range of fields to solve problems in the marine ecosystem and society. He is currently a professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
Upon receiving a Ph.D. in biology, Duarte returned to Spain where he was postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar, to then take a position as staff researcher with the Spanish National Research Council therein, and move to the ranks to research professor while moving to the Blanes Centre for Advanced Studies, and to the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies, Mallorca. In 2011 Duarte took the role of inaugural director, and Winthrop Professor, at the UWA Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia. In 2015 he joined the Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division and the Red Sea Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, where he was appointed director of the Red Sea Research Center from 2016 to 2018. He also joined the Computational Biology Research Center there in 2017. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Marine Science], and served or has served in the editorial board of multiple scientific journals. He has published over 700 scientific papers and many books and book chapters and supervised a large number of students and early career researchers. He served as elected President of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, the largest professional society on marine sciences, and has received multiple awards and honors for his research contributions. He has been recognized as a “Highly Cited Researcher”, demonstrated by production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for a research field, in all the assessment conducted thus far, including the 2018 assessment, and in 2019 was ranked within the top 0.01% across all fields, the top ranked scientists in Marine Biology and Hydrology and the 14th top expert in oceans and seas.
Research
Duarte was originally trained as a limnologist and has contributed to understanding the ecology of freshwater plants in rivers and lakes, as well as the role of freshwater ecosystems in carbon cycling. His research in the ecology and biogeochemistry of seagrass meadows and other vegetated coastal systems eventually lead – in collaboration with different UN agencies - to the development of “Blue carbon” strategies to mitigate climate change. Recognizing the many gaps in our understanding of the deep-sea pelagic ecosystem, Duarte led the Malaspina Circumnavigation Expedition, involving more than 500 scientists, and that sailed the oceans between 2010 and 2011 to provide a global assessment of the deep-sea pelagic ecosystem. The Malaspina Expedition 2010 has thus far released over 200 publications addressing different aspects of the biodiversity and function of the deep-sea ecosystem. In 2020, Duarte led an international team that, on the basis of evidences of responses of marine populations and habitats to the release of pressures, concluded that rebuilding the abundance of marine life by 2050 is an achievable Grand Challenge, and provided a road map to deliver this goal.
