Guide to plankton recognition in the Italian seas
The Guide was created within the National Programme for monitoring of marine coastal environments, a national program developed in collaboration with the Italian coastal regions, with the objective of providing, particularly to operators and technicians involved, a tool for the recognition of phyto and zooplankton in the monitored coastal areas.
Since many years in fact the taxonomic determination and the relative abundance of phytoplankton and zooplankton organisms represent a very important element in the Monitoring Program carried out by the Regions in collaboration with the Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea.
The need to define operational protocols and uniform analytical methodologies, already expressed in the Handbook on analytical methods, is now further specified in these volumes, which contribute to standardize and optimize the level of knowledge of planktonic organisms, representing at the same time a useful reference text for the recognition and classification of species along the Italian coast.