Spatial distribution of living benthic foraminifera off the Volturno River mouth (Central Tyrrhenian Sea)

Marine coastal environments are areas of naturalistic relevance, unfortunately very often modified by the anthropogenic pressure. The investigated coastal-marine area, adjacent to the Volturno River mouth (Gulf of Gaeta - central Tyrrhenian Sea), is characterized by land/sea interacting processes and tangled water column/surface sediment dynamics. The coastline shape as well as the bottom depth, the chemical-physical water column characteristics, the river mouths discharge and the anthropogenic impact, strongly control the marine-coastal zone system. The implementation of a suitable monitoring program is a priority choice in order to obtain a proper development of management policies directed towards conservation and sustainable management of natural system. One of the most interesting challenges is to propose an integrated monitoring plan able to estimate quantitatively, in space and time, by using appropriate environmental proxies, the natural and/or anthropic factors which have significant impact on marine environment. For this purpose, a reliable group of organisms to use must be benthic, abundant, widely distributed, hard shelled (to leave a post-mortem record), short live cycle (to quickly record changes in environmental parameters). Benthic foraminifera perfectly fit all these requirements (Bresler and Yanko, 2000). They are single celled organism living in different marine habitat, from the deep-sea environments to the upper limits of the transitional zones. Recent studies have shown that these organism can be used to identify different ecological provinces, to detect environmental stress conditions and to monitor successfully the health of coastal and deep marine ecosystems (e.g., Mojtahid et al., 2006; Alve et al., 2009; Schönfeld et al., 2012; Barras et al., 2014; Ferraro et al. 2006; Zeppilli et al., 2015; Yanko et al., 2017). We present the first investigations of live benthic foraminiferal assemblages, carried out in a neritic environment adjacent to the Volturno River mouth (Gulf of Gaeta - central Tyrrhenian Sea) during 3-year of monitoring cruises. The aim of this study was to compare the spatial distribution patterns of living faunas with environmental parameters (salinity, dissolved oxygen and turbidity). The research was carried out in the frame of the PONa3_00363 I-AMICA Project (http://www.i-amica.it), an Italian National Operative Program (PON), financed by the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR).