Tuesday 9 July 2013

Venice Gulf & Venice Lagoon, Adriatic Sea - OSD Pilot June 21st 2013 Study



Mini report from University of Padova, Italy (OSD Site 47 and Site 48) 
Tuesday, 9 July 2013

This OSD sampling was the first one for the Department of Biology here at the University of Padova. Having as a logistic base our hydrobiological station in Chioggia, in the southern part of the Venice Lagoon, we decided to sample two different sites. The first one was “Palude della Rosa” (OSD site 47), in the northern part of the lagoon, a shallow eutrophic salt marsh pond which is considered one of the best preserved remnant of the ancient lagoon ecosystem. The second one (OSD site 48) was located around 2 miles away from the coast in the Gulf of Venice.

We moved from the hydrobiological station at around 8:30 am (local time) in a sunny day and all the expedition took place in a quiet and pleasant sea. Since the dimension of our boat, all the filtering steps, both for sampling and chlorophyll measurement, were done by hand. As previously supposed, we were able to filter only a small volume of water for each site, ranging from 360 ml per filter in the lagoon to 600 ml per filter in the open sea. We are anyway confident that Jack at the Argonne National Laboratory will be able to extract enough DNA from the filters!

In less than 5 hours we were back to Chioggia, where Vito and Andrea, technicians of the hydrobiological station, took care of some metadata and, of course, of the boat. Instead, Fabio, Riccardo and myself, with the filters and the water for nutrient measurement preserved in dry ice, moved to Padova. It has to be noticed that nutrient and chlorophyll measurement will be performed by Dr. Chiara Facca from the Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Venezia, which collaborates with us for metadata production.

See you at the next Ocean Sampling Day!!

Alessandro Vezzi, Coordinator of OSD Sites 47 and 48.




Palude della Rosa, OSD sampling site 47. Picture was taken from the boat while filtering, and shows a fishnet and behind it the Isle of Torcello.




Fabio (on the left) and Riccardo (on the right) while filtering water for chlorophyll and nutrients measurement.


The hydrobiological station of the Department of Biology, located in Chioggia.

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