GUZZI A.

The Mediterranean Sea, as one of the world's most climate-sensitive regions, faces significant environmental changes due to rising temperatures. Zooplankton communities, particularly copepods, play a vital role in marine ecosystems, yet their distribution dynamics remain poorly understood, especially in the Ligurian Sea. Leveraging open-source...

Porifera are one of the dominant components of the marine benthic communities in the Antarctic Sea (44% of the total species are endemic). Despite these data and the various studies on marine biodiversity, the abundance and diversity of sponges on shallow Antarctic reefs and in the deep sea are likely significantly underestimated. In this...

Background The order Isopoda Latreille, 1816 consists of species occurring in terrestrial, marine and freshwater environments. In the Southern Ocean (SO), this group is amongst the most speciose and occur at all depths. Isopoda biogeography, despite being studied since the first Antarctic expeditions, is still poorly known from a geographical...

Global warming is causing significant losses of marine ice around the polar regions. In Antarctica, the retreat of tidewater glaciers is opening up novel, low-energy habitats (fjords) that have the potential to provide a negative feedback loop to climate change. These fjords are being colonized by organisms on and within the sediment and act as...

Background Distributional data on planktonic, benthic and sympagic copepods collected in the framework of the XXXIVth Expeditions of the Italian National Antarctic Programme (PNRA) to the Ross Sea sector from 2018–2019 are here provided. These occurrences correspond to specimens collected from the 25 μm filters used in the desalination plant of...

This new dataset presents occurrence data for Porifera collected in the Ross Sea, mainly in the Terra Nova Bay area, and curated at the Italian National Antarctic Museum (MNA, section of Genoa). Specimens were collected in 331 different sampling stations at depths ranging from 17 to 1,100 meters in the framework of 17 different Italian...

The need for sound baseline information about community structure and composition against which changes can be detected and quantified is a well-recognised priority in Antarctica. Here, the collection of such data is challenging, especially at sea, where long-term monitoring is usually logistically feasible only in the proximity of permanent...