Hypoxia extreme events in a changing climate: Machine learning methods and deterministic simulations for future scenarios development in the Venice Lagoon.

Climate change pressures include the dissolved oxygen decline that in lagoon ecosystems can lead to hypoxia, i.e. low dissolved oxygen concentrations, which have consequences to ecosystem functioning including biogeochemical cycling from mild to severe disruption.

Downscaled and bias-corrected bioclimatic dataset for the Mediterranean Sea (2005-2099).

This dataset provides annual statistical descriptors (mean, minimum, maximum, range and standard deviation) of key biogeochemical and physical variables for the Mediterranean Sea. It covers the period 2005-2099 under a high emissions scenario (CMIP5-RCP8.5), with a spatial resolution of 1/24 degree (∼4 km²).

Mercury cycling in contaminated coastal environments: modeling the benthic-pelagic coupling and microbial resistance in the Venice Lagoon.

Anthropogenic activities have been releasing mercury for centuries, and despite global efforts to control emissions, concentrations in environmental media remain high. Coastal sediments can be a long-term repository for mercury, but also a secondary source, and competing processes in marine ecosystems can lead to the conversion of mercury into the toxic and bioaccumulative species methylmercury, which threatens ecosystem and human health. We investigate the fate and transport of three mercury species in a coastal lagoon affected by historical pollution using a novel high-resolution finite element model that integrates mercury biogeochemistry, sediment dynamics and hydrodynamics.

Hydrology, biogeochemistry and metabolism in a semi-arid mediterranean coastal wetland ecosystem.

A LOICZ Budget Model is applied to the Ichkeul Lake, a wetland ecosystem of the South Mediterranean-North African region, to evaluate its functioning in order to boost water management. The Ichkeul Lake water and nutrient budget, net ecosystem metabolism (NEM), nutrient availability, and their seasonal changes are estimated using field data. A considerable anthropogenic-driven amount of nitrogen is transferred into N/NO to the atmosphere during the dry season with predominance of denitrification-anammox processes.

Mediterranean Mercury Assessment 2022: An Updated Budget, Health Consequences, and Research Perspectives.

Mercury (Hg) and especially its methylated species (MeHg) are toxic chemicals that contaminate humans via the consumption of seafood. The most recent UNEP Global Mercury Assessment stressed that Mediterranean populations have higher Hg levels than people elsewhere in Europe. The present Critical Review updates current knowledge on the sources, biogeochemical cycling, and mass balance of Hg in the Mediterranean and identifies perspectives for future research especially in the context of global change.

Mercury dynamics in a changing coastal area over industrial and postindustrial phases: Lessons from the Venice Lagoon.

During the industrial period, significant amounts of mercury (Hg) were discharged into the Venice Lagoon. Here, a spatially explicit model was implemented to reconstruct the temporal evolution of the total mercury (Hg) and methylmercury (MeHg) concentrations in lagoon water and sediments over two centuries (1900-2100), from preindustrial to postindustrial phases. The model simulates the transport and transformations of particulate and dissolved Hg species.

Assessing confinement in coastal lagoons.

Measures of transport scale in aquatic systems can contribute to the formulation of definitions of indicators of the system's ecological properties. This paper addresses confinement, a specific transport scale proposed by biological scientists as a parameter that can capture and synthesize the principal properties that determine the spatial structure of biological communities in transitional environments. Currently, there is no direct experimental measure of confinement.