The Marine Influence Index (MII): A Tool to Assess Estuarine Intertidal Mudflat Environments for the Purpose of Foraminiferal Biomonitoring - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Water Année : 2022

The Marine Influence Index (MII): A Tool to Assess Estuarine Intertidal Mudflat Environments for the Purpose of Foraminiferal Biomonitoring

Résumé

In this paper, we propose a marine influence index (MII), which is thought to give an integrated quantitative description of the complex of the environmental parameters controlling the foraminiferal fauna in estuarine intertidal mudflats. The MII contains three components, as follows: (1) the relative distance along the salinity gradient, (2) the emergence time relative to a reference tidal cycle, and (3) the relative importance of river outflow in the 30 days before sampling the foraminiferal fauna. Although these three parameters all have a strong relation with salinity, they also implicitly include other environmental parameters, such as the introduction of marine and continental organic matter and biota, hydrodynamic energy, or temperature. In order to show the functioning of this new index, MII is calculated for 28 stations in the Auray and Vie estuaries, for two different periods. The next step will be to compare the MII with faunal data sets. Ideally, this comparison should allow us to find strong correlations between some characteristics of the foraminiferal assemblages and the MII. If such strong correlations were indeed found, any major deviation of this relationship could then be interpreted as being due to strong anthropogenic disturbance.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
water-14-00676-v3.pdf (1.2 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte

Dates et versions

hal-04342538 , version 1 (14-12-2023)

Licence

Identifiants

Citer

Frans Jorissen, Marie Fouet, David Singer, Hélène Howa. The Marine Influence Index (MII): A Tool to Assess Estuarine Intertidal Mudflat Environments for the Purpose of Foraminiferal Biomonitoring. Water, 2022, 14 (4), pp.676. ⟨10.3390/w14040676⟩. ⟨hal-04342538⟩
29 Consultations
9 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Mastodon Facebook X LinkedIn More