What conflicts appear between economic growth models and ecological health?
portals to estuary futures
Challenge #6 - Envisioning Coastal Resilience Through Immersive Art
About
1 / Workshop / Lisboa 5-6-7 November 2025
Worksession with Miguel Pessanha Pais from mardive (a non-profit organization committed to advancing science and education for the conservation of marine biodiversity). We explored the work and technical production of their KidsDive project where vr headsets (pico) are used to immerse students into ocean environments and ecosystems through aquatic and aerial 360 videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5yIypHVoJg
Presentation and discussion with the whole Colab +ATLANTIC team in order to gather collective and personal interests, scientific insights and available resources. Some of the topics discussed during the session:
Field visit / Tejo area
We aimed to capture aerial 360 using a Phantom RTK drone and a Ricoh Theta camera, but a combination of sporadic bad-weather and the presence of [nearby military settings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Naval_Base#:~:text=The Lisbon Naval Base (Portuguese,as the Alfeite Naval Base.) made it impossible. We will try again in the next visit.
We visited the Trancão River mouth during a very low tide and we could see the different salt marshes kinds.
From there we could see the disappearing Mouchão da Póvoa, a sediment-made island that has an controversial story:
Mouchãos are often surrounded by dykes (around 3m high) that protect them from flooding and erosion. At one point, a part of the dyke broke and started to let water in, and the community that had been cultivating on it for years (because it has an underground water source) proposed a quick-fix to repair it, but apparently it was denied by the authorities, and the government did not repaired. During this incident, the community claimed ownership of the land through a lengthy legal case. During that time the dyke was not repaired and the hole got bigger and bigger. At one point, the ownership was legally awarded to the claimant (a private company), thus the government wouldn’t act on private property, and because the dyke repair summed several millions of euros, it was left un-repaired by the owners, and it ended up eroding the whole munchão. 🤷♂️ (news clip in pt) 💡Well Islands; every-high dykes protect well-like deep lands surrounded by tall wall
$alt Mar$hes: The economics of carbon sequestration. It happens that salt marshes are excellent at storing carbon, and this feature turns them into valuable assets for financial schemes, rising conservation interests not for themselves or their biological, geological, marine or social role but merely for their utilitarian potential as currency for the industry. 💡Airline-sponsored salt-marshes
We also learned about the expectations-vs-reality situation of the Vasco de Gamma bridge impact; where during its planning and construction there was a lot of opposition due to its potential environmental and biological impact, but it turned out that after the bridge was done, more birds and flamingos came to the area.
Dirty Clams: the area surrounding Praia Fluvial do Samouco has a social, ecological and sanitary problem. That area contains untreated water (as many other areas), but it also happens to be the perfect place to find Japanes Clams (Corbicula Fluminea), an invasive bivalve, and this triggers illegal collection of it, mostly done by undocumented migrants whose livelihood depend on this dangerous activity. On top of that, by being collected on un-treated waters, those clams might be harmful for human consumption, triggering an uncontrollable health hazard ******as those clams are sold un unregulated local and international markets often operated by organised crime. This is a well know issue by the authorities. 💡feral food futures / under-the-bridges hunter-gatherers 💡toxic rainbow / pollutants dye species shells and feathers (i.e peppered moth)
We visited the Salinas do Samouco, a biodiversity-rich landscape were we observed the ecosystem.
Reasons and Resorts: just next to the salinas there is the decaying and abandoned Secadouro de Alcochete, an very large city-like cod-drying facility. We learned that a grandson of an ex-worker bought the property with the intention of building a conservation-centered sustainable tourism area, but the project was declined by the environmental authorities. Surprisingly enough, just some meters away from there, there is an upscale resort.
We went to see the effect of the ferries to the salt marshes at xxxxx but unfortunately it was high tide and no ferry passed during our visit. The main issue is that that ecosystem is not used to waves, thus when ferries’s waves hit them, those are quite destructive. 💡slow-mode / estuaries as zen gardens.
We also visited Ponta dos Corvos, a narrow strip of land in between two large bodies of water, and an overflow of seawater blocked our way further.
Field visit / Sado area