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Climate change is already transforming the seascapes of our oceans by changing the energy availability and the metabolic rates of the organisms. Among the ecosystem-engineering species that structure the seascape, marine animal forests (MAFs) are the most widespread. These habitats, mainly composed of suspension feeding organisms, provide structural complexity to the sea floor, analogous to terrestrial forests. Because primary and secondary productivity is responding to different impacts, in particular to the rapid ongoing environmental changes driven by climate change, this paper presents some directions about what could happen to different MAFs depending on these fast changes. Climate change could modify the resistance or resilience of MAFs, potentially making them more sensitive to impacts from anthropic activities (i.e. fisheries and coastal management), and vice versa, direct impacts may amplify climate change constraints in MAFs. Such changes will have knock-on effects on the energy budgets of active and passive suspension feeding organisms, as well as on their phenology, larval nutritional condition, and population viability. How the future seascape will be shaped by the new energy fluxes is a crucial question that has to be urgently addressed to mitigate and adapt to the diverse impacts on natural systems. ; Funding Agency European Union (EU) 327845 ICTA "Unit of Excellence" (MinECo) MDM2015-0552 CALMED project CTM2016-79547-R AGAUR Generalitat de Catalunya (MERS) 2017 SGR 1588 National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Aim: Marine bioconstructions such as coralligenous formations are hotspot of biodi‐ versity and play a relevant ecological role in the preservation of biodiversity by provid‐ ing carbon regulation, protection and nursery areas for several marine species. For this reason, the European Union Habitat Directive included them among priority habitats to be preserved. Although their ecological role is well established, connectivity pat‐ terns are still poorly investigated, representing a limit in conservation planning. The present study pioneers a novel approach for the analysis of connectivity in marine bioconstructor species, which often lack suitable genetic markers, by taking advantage of next‐generation sequencing techniques. We assess the geographical patterns of genomic variation of the sunset cup coral Leptopsammia pruvoti Lacaze‐Duthiers, 1897, an ahermatypic, non‐zooxanthellate and solitary scleractinian coral species common in coralligenous habitats and distributed across the Mediterranean Sea. Location: The Italian coastline (Western and Central Mediterranean). Methods: We applied the restriction site‐associated 2b‐RAD approach to genotype over 1,000 high‐quality and filtered single nucleotide polymorphisms in 10 population samples. Results: The results revealed the existence of a strongly supported genetic structure, with highly significant pairwise FST values between all the population samples, includ‐ ing those collected about 5 km apart from each other. Moreover, genomic data indi‐ cate that the strongest barriers to gene flow are between the western (Ligurian–Tyrrhenian Sea) and the eastern side (Adriatic Sea) of the Italian peninsula. Main conclusions: The strong differentiation found in L. pruvoti is similar to that found in other species of marine bioconstructors investigated in this area, but it strongly contrasts with the small differences found in many fish and invertebrates at the same geographical scale. All in one, our results highlight the importance of assessing con‐ nectivity in species belonging to coralligenous habitats as, due to their limited disper‐ sal ability, they might require specific spatial conservation measures.