I, Gonçalo Prista, completed my PhD in Marine Sciences in May 2019 at the University of Lisbon, having graduated in 2007 in Marine Biology and Biotechnology by the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, and having received my master degree in 2012 by the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. After my graduation I worked in different fields, from ecotoxicology in coastal ecosystems, environmental consulting, research with soil moisture and water resources, and the study of the cetacean populations of the south of Portugal. This broad spectrum scientific (and not) activities was a result of my great passion for natural sciences, and my curiosity for every field in it. I'm a marine biologist with a beekeeping hobby. It was during my master degree that I found my field of choice, and my research became focused on how climate evolution and climatic events influence biodiversity evolution. I started using fossil Sirenia (marine mammals) from the Euro-North African realm, a work that is published and supports climate major role in forcing adaptations/extinctions, although it must be analyzed together with other relevant data (food resources, ecosystem status, eustatic variations, tectonics, etc.). My PhD moved from macro vertebrates fossils to fossil calcareous nannoplankton (unicellular algae), and the results obtained using calcareous nannoplankton, coccolithophores, have already been published in one scientific paper, with other being submitted at the time. They present a new methodology developed to extract microevolution data and morphological plasticity in the fossil record. Our data suggest that not only we can extract this type of information from the fossil record, but also that coccolithophores can be used to characterize coastal and oceanic regions in terms of primary productivity through morphometry of the placoliths. My goal is to pursue these research lines looking for the relation between climate changes and biodiversity adaptations, mainly in understanding how the current scenarios drawn by the IPCC for the next decades can affect the present upwelling system of the West coast of the Iberian Peninsula. Does a warming sea will change the primary productivity of this coast line? Will it increase or strengthen the upwelling events? What effects can be expected in the coastal communities, ecosystems and ultimately on fisheries? To understand what might happen in the future we must study the past, looking for similar periods and understand how the system worked and reacted to climate pressures. The Cenozoic presents several periods that are excellent candidates to search for the answers, like the Eocene and Miocene, and especially the warm period of the Pliocene and some interglacials of the Quaternary. My goal is to characterize these past events in Portugal west coast in order to better predict future scenarios, increasing knowledge for better and more appropriate mitigation measures.