Marina Manca

Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute of Ecosystem Study ISE

Biodiversity surveys through morphology provide invaluable data to inform biological monitoring efforts, involving specialised taxonomic skills that are not always available. The revolution brought by the advent of metabarcoding associated to massive sequencing is currently seen as a potential advance, even if different approaches may often provide...

Determining the concentration of POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) such as total dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDTtot) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the zooplankton is essential for evaluating the level of toxicity in the environment and the risk to ecosystem health. The extent to which POPs persist in the environment and affect hum...

Untangling causal links and feedbacks among biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and environmental factors is challenging due to their complex and context-dependent interactions (e.g., a nutrient-dependent relationship between diversity and biomass). Consequently, studies that only consider separable, unidirectional effects can produce divergent co...

Total mercury (THg) and methylmercury (MeHg) concentrations were analyzed in zooplankton (≥450 and ≥850 µm size fractions) collected seasonally over 6 years in Lake Maggiore (Northern Italy), characterized by a legacy mercury contamination. Analysis of δ 15N and δ13C stable isotopes was carried out to trace how taxa with different trophic levels an...

We publish a data set of environmental and biological data collected in 2000 during the ice-free period in high mountain lakes located above the local timberline in the Alps, in Italy, Switzerland and Austria. Environmental data include coordinates, geographical attributes and detailed information on vegetation, bedrock and land use in lake catchme...

Climate warming can restructure lake food webs if trophic levels differ in their thermal responses, but evidence for these changes and their underlying mechanisms remain scarce in nature. Here we document how warming lake temperatures by up to 2°C, rather than changes in trophic state or fishing effort, have restructured the pelagic food web of a l...

High mountain lakes are biodiversity treasures. They host endemic taxa, adapted to live in extreme environments. Among adaptations, production of diapausing eggs allows for overcoming the cold season. These diapausing eggs can rest in the sediments, providing a biotic reservoir known as an egg bank. Here, we estimated changes in abundance of the eg...

Zooplankton is a key node in many trophic webs, both for food that for persistent organic contaminants that can accumulate in biota. Zooplankton of different size was seasonally sampled for two years in three deep Italian subalpine lakes (Maggiore, Como, Iseo) with the aim of determining the concentrations of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), DDT,...

Zooplankton is crucial for the transfer of matter, energy, and pollutants through aquatic food webs. Primary and secondary consumers contribute to the abundance and standing stock biomass, which both vary seasonally. By means of taxa- and size-specific carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis, the path of pollutants through zooplankton is traced...

We describe the long-term (1981–2008) dynamics of several physico-chemical and biological variables and how their changes may have influenced zooplankton structure in Lake Maggiore (Italy). Data was available for the 1981–1992 and 1995–2008 periods. Standardized time-series for temperature and total phosphorus (TP), chlorophyll-a, phytoplankton den...

DDx, PCBs, PBDEs, Hg, and As contamination in sediments and aquatic organisms of different trophic levels (zooplankton, mussel, fish) were analyzed in Lake Maggiore and Lake Lugano, two large deep perialpine lakes. In the period 2001–2015, we analyzed the spatial and temporal trends of the considered pollutants to detect potential contamination sou...

Biodiversity and ecosystem research is becoming central to major societal challenges as bioeconomy and climate action. To handle the scale and complexity of the scientific question being addressed, there is a strong need to integrate scientific knowledge. However, relevant data are heterogeneous, distributed and difficult to share. Initiatives to i...

Despite DDT and PCB having been banned for about 40 years, they are still detectable in the environment. In the present research we specifically investigated the trophic transfer of these organochlorine contaminants (OC) through a pelagic food web of a deep lake in Northern Italy (Lake Como) over time. Zooplankton and fish were sampled each season...

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...

Functional-based approaches are increasingly being used to define the functional diversity of aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we proposed the use of δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N stable isotopes as a proxy of zooplankton functional traits in Lake Maggiore, a large, deep subalpine Italian lake. We analyzed the seasonal pattern of δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N signatures of diff...

Interest in Stable Isotopes Analyses (SIA) is increasing in freshwater ecology to better clarify ecosystems’ functioning. By measuring carbon and nitrogen isotopic signatures, food sources and organism trophic levels can be tracked, providing quantitative estimates of bi-dimensional niches. In order to describe some general patterns of carbon and n...

We examined fossil Cladocera (Crustacea) communities and their functional assemblages in a ~60-year sediment record from Lake Maggiore, northern Italy. Our main objective was to document the response of aquatic community functioning to environmental stress during eutrophication (1960-1985) and recovery (post-1985), and to identify environmental con...

“Lightly we passed on Earth” is the title of a novel by Sergio Atzeni, published in 1996, one year after his untimely death by drowning in the Tyrrhenian sea. The author is referring to the levity of water. «Lightly we passed on Earth”…. “like the water that flows, jumps from the hollow spring, winds between mosses and ferns up to the roots of almo...

p>Through cascading effects within lake food webs, commercial and recreational fisheries may indirectly affect the abundances of organisms at lower trophic levels, such as phytoplankton, even if they are not directly consumed. So far, interactive effects of fisheries, changing trophic state and climate upon lake ecosystems have been largely overloo...

In the previous report (D4.1, September 2016) we have developed predictive linkages between indicators of environmental quality and ecosystem services, and different types of pressures, single or multiple, across river basins from all over Europe, in a latitudinal and a west-east gradient, and having very different conditions of climate and land us...

The report includes and examines the list of taxonomists from IAMC (Institute for Coastal Marine Environment), IGG (Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources), ISE (Institute of Ecosystem Study), and ISMAR (Institute of Marine Sciences), who responded to the Taxonomy Census 2016, their scientific publications and the number of taxa described new...

Stable isotope analysis (SIA) of carbon and nitrogen sheds light on the origin of the food resources exploited by the fish and provides basic information on the trophic relationships among taxa. In this study, SIA of C and N was used to investigate the trophic behavior of fish species in a small Mediterranean reservoir, Lake Sos Canales (SC) in Sar...

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...

The recovery of lakes from severe, historical acid and metal pollution requires that colonists of extirpated species arrive, survive and subsequently thrive. We employed 40 year records from weekly to monthly crustacean zooplankton samples from Middle and Clearwater lakes near Sudbury, Canada, to identify the main mechanistic bottlenecks in this re...

The idea of launching another special issue of the Journal of limnology on Lake Orta was born in 2014, on the 25th anniversary of its liming intervention, during an International symposium on Lake Orta organized and hosted by the Pallanza Institute (http://www.ise.cnr.it/vb). The conference did not simply celebrate the past. While the liming of Lak...

Despite their ecological importance and rapid response to environmental changes, rotifers are rarely included in palaeolimnological studies. Here, we describe changes in abundance (ABD) and morphotype (MTs) diversity of rotifer resting eggs in the sediments of deep subalpine Lake Orta, Italy, covering a period prior to (pre-) 1926, during long-term...

Oscar Ravera was one of the most lively and active protagonists in the field of ecology. A man of great culture, Oscar had a genuine interest in knowledge, an interest fed by his insatiable childlike curiosity. Arriving young, at Pallanza, he found fertile ground to develop his passion for aquatic ecology, a passion that led both to important scien...

The goal of this study was to improve the understanding of the large-scale mechanisms underlying the recovery of the zooplankton of Lake Orta from historical contamination, following reduced input of ammonia and metals and the subsequent 1989/90 liming intervention. The industrial pollution had been severe and long-lasting (1929-1990). Zooplankton...

A characteristic feature of the Daphnia (Crustacea: Cladocera) life cycle are the so-called ephippia, which are fertilised eggs that need to undergo diapause. When they are shed by the female, they sink to the lake bottom, where they may become embedded in the sediment and may remain viable for decades. Extracting and hatching ephippia in the labor...

Stable isotope analysis of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) was used to study the nature and origin of the suspended particulate matter (SPM) in a small Mediterranean reservoir, Lake Sos Canales (SC). The δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N isotopic ratios, physical-chemical parameters, nutrients and phytoplankton were analyzed ca. monthly over a hydrological year on the ver...

Varved lake sediments provide opportunities for high-resolution paleolimnological investigations that may extend monitoring surveys in order to target priority management actions under climate warming. This paper provides the synthesis of an international research program relying on >150 years-long, varved records for three managed perialpine lakes...

Varved lake sediments provide opportunities for high-resolution paleolimnological investigations that may extend monitoring surveys in order to target priority management actions under climate warming. This paper provides the synthesis of an international research program relying on >150 years-long, varved records for three managed perialpine lakes...

Niche and neutral processes drive community assembly and metacommunity dynamics, but their relative importance might vary with the spatial scale. The contribution of niche processes is generally expected to increase with increasing spatial extent at a higher rate than that of neutral processes. However, the extent to what community composition is l...

We assessed long-term aquatic biodiversity patterns, with a focus on functional diversity (FD), by using sedimentary Chironomidae and Cladocera assemblages in four mountain lakes in the Austrian Alps. The objectives were to detect whether the invertebrate communities exhibited similar recent diversity trends in climate-sensitive alpine lakes, to ob...

Resurrecting legacy lineages of organisms from sediment cores of known geological age allows us to understand how environmental change can cause selection pressures that constrain the variation of populations over time. We quantified the lifetime tolerance and effects of Cu(II) exposure on Daphnia galeata in a polluted subalpine lake by comparing e...

We investigated long-term succession of sedimentary cladoceran assemblages in two morphologically divergent mountain lakes by utilizing sediment traps and previously available sediment data. We aimed to detect lake-specific changes in pelagic communities potentially attributable to climate warming under the presumption that lakes and biotic communi...

Reservoirs are subject to severe fluctuations in the water level from seasonal and interannual climatic variations, as well as abstraction for irrigation, hydropower, and drinking water. This can affect the matter and energy transfer through the food web, of which zooplankton is of crucial importance. We traced seasonal changes in the carbon and ni...

The relative role of environmental and regional processes in determining patterns of biodiversity may vary across spatial scales. In inland aquatic communities, macrophytes and zooplankton have the potential to disperse over large spatial scales (hundreds of kilometres), but the role of environmental and regional processes in determining species ri...

We investigated 2500 years of community succession in Cladocera from the sediments of a mountain lake (Lake Piramide Inferiore) located in the Khumbu Valley close to Mt. Everest in the Nepalese Himalayas. Our objective was to determine late Holocene changes in cladoceran species composition and abundance in a biogeographical context and with respec...

The limnological research conducted at the Istituto Italiano di Idrobiologia over the last 75 years has taken an ecological and interdisciplinary approach, addressing the interdependence of chemical, physical and biological aspects of freshwaters. In this paper we have tried to reconstruct the evolution of this historic institute's activities, anal...

Equinus deformity of the foot is a common feature of hemiplegia, which impairs the gait pattern of patients. The aim of the present study was to explore the role of ankle-foot deformity in gait impairment. A hierarchical cluster analysis was used to classify the gait patterns of 49 chronic hemiplegic patients with equinus deformity of the foot, bas...

1. Introduction of alien species is one of the major threats to aquatic biota and knowledge of the major correlates of their occurrence is pivotal in planning reliable conservation strategies. 2. To understand whether specific freshwater habitats are more likely to be invaded than others, a dataset on the occurrence of 1604 species in 54 taxonomic...

Investigating relation between meteo-climatic indices and between-year variation in Daphnia population density and phenology is crucial for e.g. predicting impact of climate change on lake ecosystem structure and functioning. We tested whether and how two teleconnection indices calculated for the winter period, namely the East Atlantic pattern (EAD...

When faced with disturbances such as increased salinity, aquatic communities inhabiting inland coastal systems change and may or may not be resilient after salinity decreases. The purpose of this study was to assess the potential role of the resting egg bank for zooplankton community resilience. We predicted that (1) hatching of resting eggs is inh...

La valutazione dello stato di conservazione di biodiversità, funzioni e servizi degli ecosistemi di acque interne e la stima della loro vulnerabilità ai cambiamenti climatici sono affrontate considerando tipologie omogenee di ecosistemi acquatici, alla scala integrata del bacino idrografico e della zona di transizione adiacente. Gli ecosistemi acqu...

Riassunto Le ricerche condotte nei grandi laghi a sud delle Alpi hanno dimostrato una stretta dipendenza dei processi di mescolamento da modi di circolazione atmosferica rilevanti per l'area mediterranea (East Atlantic pattern, EA e Eastern Mediterranean Pattern, EMP). In inverno, EA e EMP sono associati a una situazione di alta pressione nell'Ocea...

Zooplankton is a group of organisms of key importance in regulating patterns and mechanisms through which matter, energy and pollutants are transferred from the base to the upper levels of food webs. Even if regarded as a homogeneous compartment, in reality zooplankton is composed by organisms which differ substantially one from each other, not onl...

Quantitative estimates were provided for seasonality in littoral and pelagic sources supporting the three most important planktivorous fish (Coregonus lavaretus, Alosa agone, Rutilus rutilus ≤ 3yr) of a deep, large, subalpine lake (Lake Maggiore, Italy) by using δ13C and δ15 N stable isotope analysis. Contribution of pelagic (p) and littoral (q) si...

Gait disorders are common in multiple sclerosis (MS) and lead to a progressive reduction of function and quality of life. Test the effects of robot-assisted gait rehabilitation in MS subjects through a pilot randomized-controlled study. We enrolled MS subjects with Expanded Disability Status Scale scores within 4.5-6.5. The experimental group recei...

The occurrence of members of the highly diverse Daphnia longispina complex in Southern and Central Asian high-mountain lakes has been recognized for more than a century. Until now, however, no molecular data have been available for these populations inhabiting the ‘‘Roof of the World.’’ Here, we present the first identification for D. gr. longispin...

Invasions by non-native species are increasingly detected all over the World, as a consequence of globalization. Successful establishment implies the presence of unexploited niches and/or competitive advantage of invader vs. native closely related species. As a consequence, invasion also impacts functional diversity and trophic relationships in eco...

Feeding plasticity of Corbicula fluminea is likely of major importance for competing successfully indigenous bivalves in Lake Maggiore (Italy), thus promising the overdomination of the alien species in the area. After its first detection in 2010, our studies on spatial and temporal dynamics of abundance, biomass and population structure revealed th...

The North American ecological species Daphniapulicaria and Daphniapulex are thought to have diverged from a common ancestor by adaptation to sympatric but ecologically distinct lake and pond habitats respectively. Based on mtDNA relationships, European D. pulicaria is considered a different species only distantly related to its North American count...

Phylogenetic relationships of the LdhA haplotypes inferred by maximum likelihood. Numbers along branches indicate the percent bootstrap frequencies for bipartitions with greater than 70% support. To save space, haplotypes carried by many individuals are represented by a letter as follows: A, ESP-01_1, ESP-20_1, ESP-20_2, ESP-21_1, ESP-26_1, ESP-26_...

Phylogenetic relationships of the Rab4 haplotypes inferred by maximum likelihood. Numbers along branches indicate the percent bootstrap frequencies for bipartitions with greater than 70% support. To save space, haplotypes carried by many individuals are represented by a letter as follows: A, ESP-16_2, ESP-20_2, ESP-22_1, ESP-22_2, GBR-03_1, GBR-03_...

Individuals of the Daphniapulex species complex included in this study. (PDF)

During the past years a strong decrease of native mussels density was observed in Lake Maggiore, one of the largest subalpine Italian lakes. Some invasive species were recorded as Dreissena polymorpha, settled in this basin in 90’s, and more recently (2010) Sinanodonta woodiana and Corbicula fluminea. This latter specie was likely introduced in sou...

In the last years, increasing interest has been shown on the impact of inter-annual climate variability on zooplankton. Several teleconnection indices have been successfully applied in order to explain inter-annual variations in zooplankton and phytoplankton seasonal dynamics. During the winter months (December-February), the East Atlantic pattern...

We analysed the dynamics of the invasive Asian basket clam Corbicula fluminea in Lake Maggiore (Italy), recorded for the first time in August 2010. In order to reveal the extent of its dispersal, we monitored 30 locations along the lake for presence/absence of clams. This assessment of population structure, density and biomass is based on quantitat...

Planktonic organisms are considered good indicators of environmental changes, even more sensitive than abiotic variables per se. In relatively recent years, the importance of pluriannual plankton series has become increasingly important, also for management purposes and in the process of bridging the gap between environmental science and management...