Cymodocea nodosa as a bioindicator of coastal habitat quality: an integrative approach from organism to community scale.

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) has encouraged considerable research on the development of water quality bioindicators. Seagrasses, that are highly sensitive to direct and indirect anthropogenic stress, and specified as quality elements from the WFD, have been at the center of this effort. In this study the use of Cymodocea nodosa, a widely distributed angiosperm in the Mediterranean Sea, as a bioindicator of anthropogenic stress was tested. Key biotic features of two meadows growing in locations of contrasting ecological status in the N. Aegean Sea, Greece, were sampled and analysed following a hierarchical designed approach. Plants from the degraded meadow (Nea Karvali) were found to have significantly (p4.7 μM) had the opposite effect. Through these experiments light availability and nutrients were identified as the main factor that affects the meadows health

Biogeography pattern of the marine angiosperm Cymodocea nodosa in the eastern Mediterranean Sea related to the quaternary climatic changes

Acknowledgments This research has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program: THALES. The authors would like to thank M. Malandrakis and A. Lolas for their contribution to sampling.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Effects of flooding on the Mediterranean seagrass Cymodocea nodosa in relation to environmental degradation

This work has been conducted at the Fisheries Research Institute (ELGO DIMITRA) as an MSc dissertation of Masturah Nadzari at the University of Aberdeen with supervisors Prof. F.C. Küpper and Dr. S. Orfanidis. ΜΝ is grateful to Ms Konstantinia Nakou and Ms Olympia Nisiforou for technical assistance during her stay in FRI. FCK received funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC, program Oceans 2025 – WP 4.5 and grants NE/D521522/1 and NE/J023094/1). Both FCK and SO are grateful to the TOTAL Foundation (Paris) for funding within the framework of the project "Brown algal biodiversity and ecology in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea".Peer reviewedPostprin