Júlia is a PhD student at ICTA-UAB. She graduated in Environmental Sciences by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and did her master in Oceanography and Marine Management at the Universitat de Barcelona. She spent part of her studies at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, where she first came in touch with lagoonal ecosystems and their singularities.

She started her PhD studies in December 2021 under the supervision of Jordi Garcia-Orellana and Valentí Rodellas on the use of radioisotopes as tracers of land-ocean processes, mainly Submarine Groundwater Discharge (SGD) and Porewater Exchange (PEX). These natural processes often act as conveyors of nutrients, metals and other solutes that have an impact on coastal ecosystems.

She is currently working in the OPAL project, which aims at studying the anthropogenic impact in the Mar Menor lagoon. Within the project framework, Júlia’s work aims to untangle the relationship between SGD-driven nutrient and metal fluxes and the ecological consequences, such as the eutrophication blooms that have been occurring in the lagoon since 2016. She hopes that the information generated during her thesis can help achieve a better management of such complex and vulnerable systems.