Alberto Basset

Università del Salento | Unisalento · Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies (DiSTeBA)

LifeWatch ERIC, the e-Science European infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research, launched an Internal Joint Initiative on Non-indigenous Species and Invasive Alien Species (NIS-IAS) as they are considered one of the major drivers of biodiversity and ecosystem change. Here, the case study focused on the trophic biogeography of invasive...

Predictions of individual responses to climate change are often based on the assumption that temperature affects the metabolism of individuals independently of their body mass. However, empirical evidence indicates that interactive effects exist. Here, we investigated the response of individual standard metabolic rate (SMR) to annual temperature ra...

Human activities in riverine water bodies can cause loading of nutrients and other pollutants in receiving systems, affecting species interactions and population dynamics. The present study aimed to investigate the influence of anthropogenic alteration on an artificial water body, i.e., the Shahid Rajaee reservoir, in Iran that is experiencing a se...

The behavioural choices made by foragers regarding the use of resource patches have a direct influence on the energy balance of the individual. Given that several individual traits linked to the acquisition of spatially distributed resources increase with body size (e.g., energy requirements, resource ingestion rates, and movement capacity), it is...

According to the methodological standards established by Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the assessment for the pelagic habitat under the Biodiversity Descriptor should be carried out at the regional or sub-regional level. In the case of Mediterranean Sea, the sub-regional assessment seems optimal to take into account biogeographic differences...

The present study provides energy density (ED) data and models for four macrobenthic invertebrate genera inhabiting freshwater lotic environments (Baetis, Hydropsyche, Rhyacophila, and Onychogomphus). Samples were collected in the hydrological freshwater network of the Region Friuli Venezia Giulia within different watercourse types (creeks, streams...

Size and shape profoundly influence an organism’s ecophysiological performance and evolutionary fitness, suggesting a link between morphology and diversity. However, not much is known about how body shape is related to taxonomic richness, especially in microbes. Here we analyse global datasets of unicellular marine phytoplankton, a major group of p...

• Individual space and resource use are central issues in ecology and conservation. Recent technological advances such as automated tracking techniques are boosting ecological research in this field. However, the development of a robust method to track space and resource use is still challenging for at least one important ecosystem component: motil...

Highlights • We review the methodological issues in measuring phytoplankton sinking rate • We describe the Plankton Tracker, a novel system to investigate sinking behavior • Diatoms and dinoflagellates were individually-tracked by recording video and images • Sinking and morphological traits were obtained simultaneously • We apply Biased Correlated...

Phytoplankton sinking is an important property that can determine community composition, affecting nutrient and light absorption in the photic zone, and material loss to the deep ocean also influencing biogeochemical cycling. To date, the difficulty in exploring the sinking processes is partly due to methodological limitations in measuring phytopla...

LifeWatch Italy, the Italian node of LifeWatch ERIC, has promoted and stimulated the debate on the use of semantics in biodiversity data management. Actually, biodiversity and ecosystems data are very heterogeneous and need to be better managed to improve the actual scientific knowledge extracted, as well as to address the urgent societal challenge...

Individual energy requirements are tightly related to individual resource use and by extension of space‐use patterns and other traits at higher levels of the ecological hierarchy. However, there is still little experimental evidence linking individual energetics and space‐use behaviour. Individual energy requirements scale mainly with body size and...

A common belief is that body mass scaling of metabolic rate results chiefly from intrinsic body-design constraints. However, several studies have shown that multiple ecological factors affect metabolic scaling. The mechanistic basis of these effects is largely unknown. Here, we explore whether abiotic and biotic environmental factors have interacti...

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Research Infrastructures (RIs) are large-scale facilities encompassing instruments, resources, data and services used by the scientific community to conduct high-level research in their respective fields. The development and integration of marine environmental RIs as European Research Vessel Operators [ERVO] (2020) is the response of the European C...

Organisms' size and shape have a profound influence on ecophysiological performance and evolutionary fitness, suggesting a link between morphology and diversity. While unimodal relationships between size and species richness were found for many taxa(1-4), much less is known on how richness is related to shape, in particular in the microbial realm....

This study is focused on investigating the variation patterns of macroinvertebrate guilds functional structure, in relation to the taxonomic one, across aquatic ecosystem types along the salinity gradient from freshwater to marine and the resulting implications on guild organization and energy flows. Synoptic samplings have been carried out using t...

Since the first decades of the last century, several hypotheses have been proposed on the role of phytoplankton morphology in maintaining a favorable position in the water column. Here, by an extensive review of literature on sinking rate and cell volume, we firstly attempted to explore the dependency of sinking rate on morphological traits using t...

To explore the interactive effects of temperature (an abiotic factor) and predation (a biotic factor) on metabolic scaling of amphipod crustaceans inhabiting freshwater springs and saltwater lagoons. R = aMb a: mass coefficient b: scaling exponent Laboratory experiments on amphipods from freshwater springs in Pennsylvania (USA) with and without f...

Giving Up Densities of granivorous rodents. We included in our meta-analysis 543 Giving Up Density (GUD) measures reported from 57 papers (Data S1 Reference list). The metadaset includes data on 40 granivorous rodents species belonging to 3 taxonomic suborders, 3 habitat typologies and 8 combinations of patch risk conditions patch risk conditions (...

Individual size is a major determinant of mobile organisms' ecology and behavior. This study aims to explore whether allometric scaling principles can provide an underlying framework for general patterns of resource patch use. To this end, we used Giving Up Densities (GUDs), i.e. the amount of resources remaining in a patch after a forager has quit...

Standard metabolic rate is a major functional trait with large inter-individual variability in many groups of aquatic species. Here we present results of an experimental study to address variation in standard metabolic rates, over different scales of organisation and environments, within a specific group of aquatic macro-invertebrates (i.e. gammari...

Standard metabolic rate is a major functional trait with large inter-individual variability in many groups of aquatic species. Here we present results of an experimental study to address variation in standard metabolic rates, over different scales of organisation and environments, within a specific group of aquatic macroinvertebrates (i.e. gammarid...

The present study is an attempt to deepen the knowledge about energy patterns in a detritus-based ecosystem located within a temporary wetland, where changes of water level can affect productivity, turnover of organic matter and the flow-through energy. Energy density was directly measured using an adiabatic bomb calorimeter in samples collected in...

Behaviour related to patch resource exploitation is a major determinant of individual fitness. Assuming the size-dependency of patch departure behaviour, model-based approaches have shown size-mediated coexistence in systems of competing species. However, experimental evidence for the influence of body size on patch use behaviour is scarce. In this...

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) allow observation and reporting of global biodiversity change, but a detailed framework for the empirical derivation of specific EBVs has yet to be developed. Here, we re-examine and refine the previous candidate set of species traits EBVs and show how traits related to phenology, morphology, reproduction, ph...

At present there is no consistent approach for the definition of Good Environmental Status (GES) and targets in the Mediterranean Sea, especially for Biodiversity Descriptors, according to the Article 12 of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). The use of plankton indicators in the Mediterranean Sea refers mostly to pelagic habitats in co...

Decomposition processes are a major source of energy in lagoon ecosystems, but compared to primary production, little quantitative information is available on their relative importance for energy pathways within lagoon food webs. Here, the ability of cross-community scaling relationships (CCSRs) to describe energy pathways in macroinvertebrate guil...

A serious game on ecological matter and Earth sciences is one of the products of ENVRIplus project. ENVRIplus is a cluster of Research Infrastructures (RIs) for Environmental and Earth System sciences aiming at improving Earth observation monitoring systems and strategies. Here we present the ongoing activities of the training action, which has a s...

A first synoptic and trans-domain overviewof plankton dynamics was conducted across the aquatic sites belonging to the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER-Italy). Based on published studies, checked and complemented with unpublished information, we investigated phytoplankton and zooplankton annual dynamics and long-term changes acro...

Phytoplankton is a key element for the assessment of ecological and environmental status of aquatic ecosystems, also in the frame of the MSFD. The methods used to analyse phytoplankton communities are mainly based on time consuming cell counts, dictating a trade-off between the number of cells counted and the number of phytoplankton samples in a mo...

In the last few decades, functional trait-based approaches have undergone an extraordinary expansion in phytoplankton ecology, due to the relative simplicity and the well-defined traits that determine the ecological niche of these organisms. A large quantity of heterogeneous and distributed data has been produced on phytoplankton traits and their u...

The relative role of propagule pressure, abiotic and biotic variables as determinants of alien species occurrence differs among studies. This limits the synthesis of emergent patterns in invasion ecology and generalisations for conservation actions. In order to produce a broad and general assessment of the invasion pattern in aquatic habitats we he...

In the context of maintenance of biodiversity and ecological functions, microbial ecologists face the challenge of linking individual level variability in functional traits to larger scale ecosystem processes. Phytoplankton cell size and shape are key traits under selection by environmental filters and species interactions. Spatial differences in r...

We investigated the cascading effects of chemical contaminants on alder leaf detritus quality and the exploitation of this feeding resource by benthic macroinvertebrates (isopods, gastropods, and mayfly nymphs). Trophic behavior and energetics of benthic macroinvertebrates were used to evaluate the effects of contaminants on detritus exploitation....

High environmental variability is a feature of transitional water ecosystems, which also affects temporal and spatial patterns of phytoplankton. The Lagoon of Venice is characterised by a wide range of environmental conditions, high phytoplankton species diversity and abundance variability. Here we focus on morphological traits and specifically, fo...

Cross-community scaling relationships (CCSRs), which result from individual density scaling with average individual body size at guild and community levels, enable investigation of energy constraints at high levels of the ecological hierarchy. Here, we studied cross-community scaling relationships in benthic macroinvertebrate guilds in 15 Mediterra...

We present a data set on the biodiversity of Italian freshwaters, including lakeshores and riverbanks of natural (N=379: springs, streams and lakes) and artificial (N=11: fountains) sites. The data set belongs partly to the Italian Long Term Ecological Research network (LTER-Italy) and partly to LifeWatch, the European e-Science infrastructure for...

About 5–10% of the world's land surface is currently wetland but possibly >70% is already destroyed or impaired. Conservation of these unique ecosystems lags progress in other realms, reflected in high rates of biodiversity loss. Wetlands provide a range of critically important ecosystem services including fresh water, nutrient cycling, food and fi...

The relative role of propagule pressure, abiotic and biotic variables as determinants of non-native species occurrence differs among studies, hindering the synthesis of emergent patterns in invasion ecology and preventing generalisation for conservation actions. In order to produce a broad and general assessment of the occurrence of alien species i...

The metabolism of benthic aquatic invertebrates, populating transitional water ecosystems, is influenced by both physiological and environmental factors, thus involving an adjustment of physiological processes which has a metabolic cost. In order to discover changes in metabolic pathways in response to specific factors, it's firstly necessary chara...

1. Spread of alien species (AS) is a serious threat to marine habitats and analysis of principal descriptors of their occurrence is pivotal to set reliable conservation strategies. 2. In order to assess the susceptibility of marine habitats to biological invasions, a dataset was gathered of the occurrence of 3899 species from 29 phyla, taken from 9...

Wetlands are one of the most biologically productive ecosystems, in which reedbeds of Phragmites australis are an essentially detritus-based system where litter decomposition is a fundamental process. This study represents a three year dataset describing cyclic trends of Phragmites australis leaf litter breakdown in a temporary and managed environm...

“Creating a scientific world based on e-infrastructures will not be easy. (…) how will users from a wide range of backgrounds understand the data they are accessing? (…) Diversity is a dominant feature of scientific information – diversity of data formats and types, but also of the people and communities that generate and use the data”. [1] The fin...

This study was seasonally performed over a three year period in a large freshwater temporary pond to investigate (a) seasonal trends of the main abiotic factors, (b) the most important abiotic drivers in shaping macrobenthic invertebrate communities and (c) the structures of these communities among different years. As the study area was placed with...

Understanding the mechanisms of phytoplankton community assembly is a fundamental issue of aquatic ecology. Here, we use field data from transitional (e.g. coastal lagoons) and coastal water environments to decode patterns of phytoplankton size distribution into organization and adaptive mechanisms. Transitional waters are characterized by higher r...

Confocal laser scanner microscopy coupled with an image analysis system was used to directly determine the shape and calculate the biovolume of phytoplankton organisms by constructing 3D models of cells. The study was performed on Biceratium furca (Ehrenberg) Vanhoeffen, which is one of the most complex-shaped phytoplankton. Traditionally, biovolum...

This contribution describes ' Research Game ' , a game produced in a Lifelong Learning Programme - ­‐Comenius Project (The European Scientific Research Game) which aims at motivating secondary school students through the experience of the excitement of scientific research . The project proposes practical and didactic works which combine theoretical...

Benthic communities were studied twice (during the autumn and spring) in three Mediterranean coastal lagoons located in Greece (Logarou) and Italy (Cesine and Grado-Marano). The species composition and distribution, community diversity, species richness, dominant taxa and their ecological identity, benthic trophic and biomass size structure were in...

Aphanius fasciatus (Valenciennes), Atherina boyeri Risso and Knipowitschia panizzae (Verga) are considered resident fish species in Italian coastal lagoons, which spend their entire life cycle within the brackish waters. They are short-lived species, with a small size, and a rapid growth and attainment of sexual maturity. All these fish species are...

c) Holling’s functional responses (Holling, 1959 a,b) Holling’s functional responses describe the intake rate of a consumer as a function of food density. Type I response assumes a linear increase with food density. Type II and Type III are characterized by decelerating intake rate. where I is the individual intake rate, c is the half-saturation co...

The loss of species is known to have negative impacts on the integrity of ecosystems, but the details of this relationship are still far from being fully understood. This study investigates how the distribution patterns of polychaete species and their associated biological traits patterns in six Mediterranean coastal lagoons change under computatio...