Marine macrobenthic assemblages off Bevano River mouth (2019)

This dataset provides the abundance (ind. m-2) of marine macrobenthic invertebrate species at 39 random sampling points from 0.5 to 8 m depth along the coast (5 km) off the NATURA 2000 site IT4070009 "Ortazzo, Ortazzino e Foce del Torrente Bevano", sampled from 22 May to 4 July, 2019. Sediment grain size and organic matter are also provided.

The dataset is provided 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 

- ESRI Shapefile (UTF-8, geometry point, EPSG:4326 - WGS 84)

The dataset includes 39 records, one for each sampling point, and 111 fields. The first 12 fields are described in Table 4). The following fields concern the abundance of the identified taxa as individuals preserved in alcohol sorted and classified under microscope (ind. m-2 ± 10). 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/) is provided here.

A total of 99 soft bottom taxa belonging to the Phyla Annelida (29), Arthropoda (28), Cnidaria (1), Echinodermata (2), Mollusca (37), Nemertea (1), and Phoronida (1) were identified. Of these, 51 have been recognized at species level.

This dataset comes from the project "Characterization of the mouth area of the Bevano River and identification of strategies for the conservation and enhancement of nursery areas for protected species of commercial interest", carried out by the Interdepartmental Research Center for Environmental Sciences (CIRSA) of the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. The project was financed by the Emilia-Romagna Region (call FLAG Costa dell'Emilia-Romagna 2018) with funds from the European Union (FEAMP 2014/2020, Action 2.A.a, "Marine and lagoon habitats - Studies and research"), and took place from January to August 2019 (Abbiati et al., 2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4016598). This dataset has been revised and completed within the project "Ecosystem for Sustainable Transition in Emilia-Romagna" (Code: ECS_00000033 - CUP: B33D21019790006; Mission 04 Education and research - Component 2 From research to business Investment 1.5 - NextGenerationEU) .

First 12 fields in the dataset.

Field

Darwin Core term

Unit

Precision

Note

locationID

locationID

NA

NA

Sampling location identifier (ID) specific to the data set

samplingDate

eventDate

YYYY-MM-DD

NA

Conforms to ISO 8601-1:2019

samplingTime

eventTime

HH:MM

± 10 min

Central European Summer Time CEST (UTC+2) conforms to ISO 8601-1:2019

decimalLatitude

decimalLatitude

decimal degrees

± 0.00001

WGS84 (EPSG: 4326) - WAAS/EGNOS enabled GPS position

decimalLongitude

decimalLongitude

decimal degrees

± 0.00001

WGS84 (EPSG: 4326) - WAAS/EGNOS enabled GPS position

Depth

maximumDepthInMeters

m

± 0.1

Mean Lower Low Water - measured with echosounder or depth gauge corrected by tide gauge of Porto Corsini (RA)

SamplingGear

NA

NA

NA

Van Veen grab operated from boat or bailer manually operated by diver inside a cylindrical frame

SamplingArea

NA

m^2

± 0.001

Sampler size

Mud

NA

% dry mass

± 0.1%

<63 µ wet sieved recovered on Whatman filter paper and then dried at 80°C for 24 hours before weighing at ± 0.00001 g

FineSand

NA

% dry mass

± 0.1%

250-63 µ wet sieved recovered on Whatman filter paper and then dried at 80°C for 24 hours before weighing at ± 0.00001 g

MediumSand

NA

% dry mass

± 0.1%

>250 µ wet sieved recovered on Whatman filter paper and then dried at 80°C for 24 hours before weighing at ± 0.00001 g

OrganicMatter

NA

% dry mass

± 0.1%

Loss on Ignition (LOI%) at 450°C 8h and weighted at ± 0.00001 g

Actiniaria

NA

ind. m^-2

± 10

Individuals preserved in alcohol sorted and classified under microscope