Marker pigments and carbon biomass of phytoplankton on the northeastern Mediterranean Sea coast

Eker-Develi, Elif

Marker pigments are used to determine taxonomic composition and biomass of microalgae in different oceanic regions. However, sometimes discrepancies are encountered between microscopy and marker pigment based approaches principally because of altering environmental factors influencing diversity of phytoplankton. In the present investigation, marker pigments from HPLC-CHEMTAX analysis concurrent with carbon biomass estimated by microscopy were investigated during 2015–2016 at weekly intervals in the eastern Mediterranean Sea coast. Counting nanoplankton (in particular non-calcifying haptophytes and prasinophytes) in live samples provided a better correlation between microscopy and pigment-based results than in fixed samples. Nanoplankton and picoplankton constituted ~56% of chlorophyll a ba...