ARMS in ports: Monitoring Non-Indigenous Species through Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures

This datasets provides information on marine macrozoobenthic species (both sessile and vagile fraction) in the Ravenna Port. Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) were deployed in two sites, a commercial harbor (H) and a touristic marina (M) in the port of Ravenna (Emilia-Romagna, IT), during three seasons (winter, spring, and summer) between 2021-2022 and left underwater for three/six months. The colonizing sessile communities were assessed by image analyses (photoQuad), and motile fauna (> 2 mm) was identified morphologically using stereomicroscope. More detail are given in the metadata file.

Datasets are contained in three separated folder (.zip file):

Community_Composition_ARMS_Ravenna_2021-2022 (Presence/Absence data)

Motile_Fraction_ARMS_Ravenna_2021-2022 (Abundance data)

Sessile_Fraction_ARMS_Ravenna_2021-2022 (Percent cover data)

Each folder provided dataset in three formats: 

Microsoft Excel XLSX file, including 3 sheets (Dataset, Fields and units, Taxonomy).

CSV files (UTF-8), 3 files corresponding to the 3 sheets of the Excel file.

PDF file of metadata

All the dataset fields are described in the file "Fields and units", while the taxonomic related information for each taxon is provided in the file "Taxonomy". Information extracted from the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS; https://marinespecies.org/; accessed in 2023/11/30) is provided here.

The project is part of the European ARMS program (ARMS-MBON, https://www.vliz.be/projects/assembleplus/node/2326.html) within the European Marine Omics Biodiversity Observation Network (EMO BON, https://www.embrc.eu/services/emo-bon). This study was carried out within the RETURN Extended Partnership and received funding from the European Union Next-GenerationEU (National Recovery and Resilience Plan – NRRP, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3 – D.D. 1243 2/8/2022, PE0000005) and within the project "Ecosystem for Sustainable Transition in Emilia-Romagna" (ECOSISTER, Code: ECS_00000033 - CUP: B33D21019790006; Mission 04 Education and research - Component 2 From research to business Investment 1.5 - NextGenerationEU).