High-throughput sequencing of microbial assemblages has been proposed as an alternative methodology to the traditional ones used in marine monitoring and environmental assessment. Here, we evaluated pico- and nanoplankton diversity as ecological indicators in NW Mediterranean coastal waters by comparing their diversity in samples subjected to varying degrees of continental pressures. Using metabarcoding of the 16S and 18S rRNA genes, we explored whether alphadiversity indices, abundance of Operational Taxonomic Units and taxonomic groups (and their ratios) provide information on the ecological quality of coastal waters. Our results revealed that only eukaryotic diversity metrics and a limited number of prokaryotic and eukaryotic taxa displayed potential in assessing continental influences in our surveyed area, resulting thus in a restrained potential of microbial plankton diversity as an ecological indicator. Therefore, incorporating microbial plankton diversity in environmental assessment could not always result in a significant improvement of current marine monitoring strategies.

已提出对微生物组合进行高通量测序，作为海洋监测和环境评估中使用的传统方法的替代方法。在这里，我们通过比较承受不同程度大陆压力的样本中的微微和纳克浮游生物多样性作为西北地中海沿岸水域的生态指标，来评估它们的多样性。使用16S和18S rRNA基因的metabarcoding，我们探讨了alphadiversity指数，业务分类单位和分类组的数量（及其比率）是否提供了有关沿海水域生态质量的信息。我们的研究结果表明，只有真核生物多样性指标以及数量有限的原核和真核生物类群才有潜力评估我们调查区域内的大陆影响，因此，限制了微生物浮游生物多样性作为生态指标的潜力。因此，将微生物浮游生物的多样性纳入环境评估中并不能总导致当前海洋监测策略的显着改善。