Biodiversità ed ecologia della comunità meiobentonica in relazione a diverse tipologie di habitat

Coastal environments are subjected to an increasing number of events in both global and local scale which damage their integrity and functionality. The estimation of biodiversity and the study of bioindicators are important key within the European Directives to investigate the environmental health. The state of the ecological quality of coastal waters can be assessed by considering not only macrobenthos but also lesser known and microscopic organisms such as meiobenthos. Meiobenthos (30µ-1mm) comprises animal that show a high sensitivity to different types of environmental disturbance. However, the diversity of habitats and living conditions of the meiobenthos are so large that the morphological adaptations of different taxa follow few general trends. The aim of this paper was to analyzed the diversity of meiobenthic community in two different habitat type (soft and hard bottom) in order to improve the knowledge of meiobenthos community in Adriatic and Ligurian coast and to evaluating the ecological quality of these marine environments. Nematodes and copepods communities were deeply analyzed respectively in soft and hard bottom. On the basis of our results, along the Adriatic coast the disturbance effects might be caused by both local streams and Po plume, while along Liguria coast the principal effects were due to Entella river. Both studies show the large utility and potential of meiobenthos in environmental monitoring studies, especially to assess the biological and ecological effects due to factors disorder, including stress of anthropogenic origin, and not simply measure the values of absolute concentration of a pollutant