Patrizia Ziveri

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Patrizia Ziveri is ICREA Research Professor and Scientific Director of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) Unit of Excellence ‘María de Maeztu’, Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She started to work on marine global change in the 1990’s during her PhD dissertation at the Univ. of Padua (Italy), and Univ. of South Carolina (USA), focusing on the impacts of El Niño climate oscillations on calcareous phytoplankton in the Eastern Pacific. After a postdoc at USC, she moved to the Vrije Univ. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, first as a researcher then as associate professor/senior scientist. She was awarded with a Spanish ‘Ramón y Cajal fellowship at the UAB before joining ICREA in 2014. She coordinates the Marine and Environmental Biogeosciences Research Group  (MERS) that catalyzes research on the natural and human-driven marine processes addressing major marine global change and sustainability challenges.


Research interests

Global environmental change on marine ecosystems, ecology, and biogeochemistry at various time scales and complexity is a key theme of her research group, focusing on multidisciplinary investigation of marine calcifying organisms at the base of the food web. With her work on the ocean in a high CO2 world, she is linking the CO2 dynamics, climate change and marine organisms in target regions. Interest on pressing threats to marine systems has led to developing research on ocean acidification (OA) in Africa, and in the North Pacific on both climate change and the cycle of microplastics. The study of marine litter and microplastics in Mediterranean island coastlines is an emerging topic in her research group and a new clean laboratory for microplastic studies opened recently at ICTA-UAB. These global change processes can disturb the capacity of marine systems to provide ecosystem services, thereby affecting economic activities and human welfare.

Selected publications

– Rosas-Navarro A, Langer G, Ziveri P 2018, Temperature affects the morphology and calcification of Emiliania huxleyi strains, PLoS ONE, vol.13, no.3, e0194386.

– Taylor BJ, Rae JWB, Gray WR, Darling K, Burke A, Gersonde R, Abelmann A, Maier E, Esper O, Ziveri P 2018, Distribution and ecology of planktic foraminifera in the North Pacific: Implications for paleo-reconstructions, Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 191, no. 1, pp 256–274.

– D’Amario B, Ziveri P, Grelaud M, Oviedo A 2018, Emiliania huxleyi coccolith calcite mass modulation by morphological changes and ecology in the Mediterranean Sea. PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 7, e0201161.

– Subhasa AV, Rollins NE, Berelson WM, Erez J, Ziveri P, Langer G, Adkins JF 2018, The Dissolution Behavior of Biogenic Calcites in Seawater and a Possible Role for Magnesium and Organic Carbon,  Marine Chemistry, vol. 205, pp 100-112.

– Schlitzer R, Anderson RF, Masferrer Dodas E, Lohan M, Geiberta W, Tagliabue A, … Ziveri P, Zunino P, Zurbrick C 2018, ‘The GEOTRACES Intermediate Data Product 2017‘, Chemical Geology, vol. 493, pp 210-223.

Selected research activities

– ‘The present impacts and the future risks for the Mediterranean Sea ecosystems’ keynote lecture at the 3rd International Symposium of Ocean Governance and Sustainability- Working Group Ocean Acidification and Climate Change (OACC). Invited lectures and discussion panel member at conferences, workshops and EU Parliament event on microplastics, marine litter and sustainable tourism.

– Scientific member of the SOLAS/IMBER Carbon Working Group, Subgroup on Ocean Acidification (SIOA); Advisory Board member of the IAEA project “Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre” (OA-ICC).

– Director of Ph.D. thesis (UAB) of Anaid Rosas-Navarro ‘“Impact of climate warming and acidification on coccolithophore ecology and calcification” (July/2018) and of four master theses.

– Scientific Director of ICTA-UAB ‘unit of excellence’.