Artificial reefs created from sunken ships in Madeira and Porto Santo help support marine biodiversity, but cannot reproduce all the ecological functions of natural reefs, a scientific study has concluded. The findings are based on nine years of fish monitoring by Madeira’s marine biodiversity programme, BioMa.
Pedro Neves, a researcher at the Oceanic Observatory of Madeira, stated that the study compared two natural reefs and one artificial reef on each island. The artificial reefs studied were created by sinking former Portuguese Navy corvettes: the Afonso Cerqueira off Madeira and the General Pereira d’Eça off Porto Santo.
"We concluded that artificial reefs behave like natural reefs in some respects, because more or less the same species are found in both places," Neves said. "However, the species living around the artificial reefs do not perform all the same ecological functions as those found on natural reefs. Artificial reefs remain very important, for example, for diving, tourism, and the local economy, but we cannot regard them as substitutes for natural reefs."
