Data from: Environmental monitoring through protist NGS metabarcoding: assessing the impact of fish farming on benthic foraminifera communities
Jan Pawlowski, Philippe Esling, Franck Lejzerowicz, Tomas Cedhagen, Tom Wilding & Thomas A. Wilding
The measurement of species diversity represents a powerful tool for assessing the impacts of human activities on marine ecosystems. Traditionally, the impact of fish farming on the coastal environment is evaluated by monitoring the dynamics of macrobenthic infaunal populations. However, taxonomic sorting and morphology-based identification of the macrobenthos demands highly trained specialists and is extremely time-consuming and costly, what makes it unsuitable for large-scale biomonitoring efforts involving numerous samples. Here, we propose to alleviate this...