The conservation of biodiversity is fundamental to ensure the ecosystem stability, functions and services. Transitional waters (TWs) support a remarkable biodiversity but the growing of anthropogenic pressures threats their ecosystem health, induces to act new conservation strategies and biomonitoring plans. So that new genomic approaches are also emerging as strategic and useful tools for the assessment of ecological status. Macroinvertebrates are good ecological indicators for TWs, but very few studies have highlighted that both descriptors and ecological indicators can depend by sampling method and effort. The bioassessment with macroinvertebrates is time consuming and requires high costs. Moreover the use of more than one sampling technique can be require to collect both bottom and vagile fauna. Our research aims to evaluate the influence of sampling methods - box-corer and litterbag, and of habitat type - prairie and unvegetated, on descriptors and indicators. The experiment was run in a protected Mediterranean shallow lagoon dominated by marine waters. Biodiversity and ecological indicators of macroinvertebrates were measured and compared among sampling techniques and habitats and the relevance of using more than one sampling technique to obtain a better description of biodiversity and ecological status was highlighted. Anyway the transferring of this methodology to biomonitoring programmes is highly limited by time consuming and costs. The future goal of our research is to apply molecular tools to record the entire biodiversity of macroinvertebrates in Southern-Italy aquatic ecosystems, both in reference and perturbed conditions. In particular, we will use DNA barcoding and eDNA analysis for this purpose.
Biodiversity monitoring of South-Mediterranean aquatic ecosystems using benthic macroinvertebrates: Comparison between traditional and genomic methods
Specchia V.
;Marini G;Pinna M
2017-01-01
Abstract
The conservation of biodiversity is fundamental to ensure the ecosystem stability, functions and services. Transitional waters (TWs) support a remarkable biodiversity but the growing of anthropogenic pressures threats their ecosystem health, induces to act new conservation strategies and biomonitoring plans. So that new genomic approaches are also emerging as strategic and useful tools for the assessment of ecological status. Macroinvertebrates are good ecological indicators for TWs, but very few studies have highlighted that both descriptors and ecological indicators can depend by sampling method and effort. The bioassessment with macroinvertebrates is time consuming and requires high costs. Moreover the use of more than one sampling technique can be require to collect both bottom and vagile fauna. Our research aims to evaluate the influence of sampling methods - box-corer and litterbag, and of habitat type - prairie and unvegetated, on descriptors and indicators. The experiment was run in a protected Mediterranean shallow lagoon dominated by marine waters. Biodiversity and ecological indicators of macroinvertebrates were measured and compared among sampling techniques and habitats and the relevance of using more than one sampling technique to obtain a better description of biodiversity and ecological status was highlighted. Anyway the transferring of this methodology to biomonitoring programmes is highly limited by time consuming and costs. The future goal of our research is to apply molecular tools to record the entire biodiversity of macroinvertebrates in Southern-Italy aquatic ecosystems, both in reference and perturbed conditions. In particular, we will use DNA barcoding and eDNA analysis for this purpose.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
