Wrack deposits provide potential food, shelter and breeding sites for marine and terrestrial invertebrate macrofauna and can support communities with high diversity, abundance and biomass. Macrofauna may also play important roles in the fragmentation, decomposition and incorporation of wrack into the beach and nearshore ecosystem. In this chapter I sampled surface-active macrofauna using pitfal...

Sediments of five Ligurian beaches in compliance with European Union bathing water regulations were studied based on the characteristics of the fungal assemblage during the tourism season. Among the 179 taxa of filamentous fungi isolated, 120 were opportunistic pathogens, such as Acremonium sp., and the genus Penicillium was also present as the pathogenic species P. citrinum. Furthermore, 5% of...

UCHIYAMA, Y., 2007. Hydrodynamics and associated morphological variations on an estuarine intertidal sand flat. Journal of Coastal Research, 23(4), 1015–1027. West Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Hydrodynamics, sediment suspension, and morphological response on an estuarine intertidal sand flat in Tokyo Bay, Japan, are examined through a field experiment performed for 16 days in winter 20...

The amount of wrack deposited and retained on a beach may be affected by the beach’s morphology. Conversely, wrack deposits have the potential to modify sediment dynamics on the beach face through accumulation and erosion of sediments around wrack deposits, and the incorporation of organic matter into beach sands. The aims of this chapter were thus to determine whether beach morphology differed...

Exposed sandy beaches are highly dynamic ecosystems where macroinvertebrate species cope with extremely variable environmental conditions. The majority of the beach ecology studies present exposed beaches as physically dominated ecosystems where abiotic factors largely determine the structure and distribution of macrobenthic communities. However, beach species patterns at different scales can b...