The monitoring of phytoplankton is crucial to highlight changes in the marine ecosystems. In the present study, the phytoplankton community of an eLTER station in the Northern Adriatic Sea was analysed combining two approaches, i.e. microscopy and eDNA metabarcoding (targeting V4 and V9 regions of the 18S rRNA gene, and using PR2 and SILVA as reference databases), to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these two methods....

We investigated the biodiversity and seasonality of subtidal benthic diatoms at two sites of the Northern Adriatic Sea differently affected by anthropogenic inputs. Sediment samples were collected seasonally, and diatom cells were then separated from the sediment using the density gradient centrifugation method. The total abundance of benthic diatoms ranged between 4,409 ± 1,638 and 77,663 ± 30,415 cells cm-2 and the biomass b...

In the framework of benthic harmful algal bloom monitoring, the most common sampling strategy is based on the collection of macroalgae, and the abundance of epiphytic microalgae are mainly expressed as cells g −1 macroalgal fresh weight (fw). However, this methodology has some inherent problems, due to (i) the thallus-specific weights that markedly differ among algal species, (ii) the thallus architecture, and (iii) the produc...

Intense blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate Ostreopsis producing palytoxin (PlTX) analogs, mainly ovatoxins (OVTXs), have been a recurrent phenomenon along several Mediterranean coasts. Although there is evidence of seafood contamination by these toxins, the dynamics of their bioaccumulation during Ostreopsis blooms is not yet clear. Toxin concentrations in wild mussels at two sites in the Conero Riviera, along the northern Adr...