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Indirect estimation of benthic secondary production in the Lagoon of Venice (Italy)

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Abstract

Five published indirect methods to estimate benthic secondary production of intertidal mudflats and a new proposed formulation based on quarter-power allometric scaling and the “Universal Temperature Dependence” of biological processes (UTD) were compared. For this purpose, a dataset consisting of an annual series of samples, taken from the Lagoon of Venice from March 1996 to March 1997, at sites characterised by different seagrass coverage was used. All methods resulted in that biomass and secondary production decreased progressively when moving from the seagrass meadow toward areas of unvegetated substrate, suggesting an influence of the available marine phanerogams on the neighbouring sites. The equation proposed in this paper gives results comparable with those obtained using empirical regression models from literature. The main conclusion from this study is that general equations proposed by the “metabolic theory of ecology” can be applied for indirect estimations of secondary production of benthic communities.

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Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks are due to Professor Andreina Zitelli for her support, to the guest editor Professor Victor N. de Jonge for stimulating us to thoroughly revise and resubmit the manuscript, to Verena Brauer for checking the mathematical formulations, to Sophia Fox and Mirta Teichberg for the revision of the text and to the reviewers of this paper because of their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNR-Istituto di Scienze Marine, Venezia, Castello 1364a, 30122, Venice, Italy

    D. Tagliapietra

  2. ICRAM, Loc. Brondolo, Chioggia, 30015, Venice, Italy

    M. Cornello

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, 30100, Venice, Italy

    G. Pessa

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  1. D. Tagliapietra
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  2. M. Cornello
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  3. G. Pessa
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Correspondence to D. Tagliapietra.

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Tagliapietra, D., Cornello, M. & Pessa, G. Indirect estimation of benthic secondary production in the Lagoon of Venice (Italy). Hydrobiologia 588, 205–212 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-007-0663-0

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