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The unprecedented rates of current biodiversity loss have motivated a renewed interest in environmental and biodiversity monitoring. The need for sustained monitoring strategies has prompted not only the establisment of new long-term monitoring programmes, but also the rescue of data from historical or otherwise archived sources. Amongst the most valuable datasets are those containing information on intertidal systems, as they are particularly well suited for studying the biological effects of climate change. The Portuguese rocky coast is quite interesting for studying the effects of climate change on the distribution of species due to its geographical orientation, latitudinal patterns in temperature, species richness, species' distribution patterns and availability of historical information. This work aims at providing a comprehensive picture of the distribution and abundance of intertidal macro-invertebrates and macro-algae along the Portuguese rocky coast in the early 2000s.This study provides a description of the rocky shore intertidal biodiversity of the mainland Portuguese coast in the early 2000s. The spatial distribution and semi-quantitative abundance of a total of 238 taxa were assessed at 49 wave-exposed locations. These data provide a comprehensive baseline against which biodiversity changes can be effectively and objectively evaluated.

Background Climate change has been increasing at an unprecedented rate in the last decades. Global warming has been causing a variety of impacts in marine ecosystems, including shifts in the geographical ranges of species. The north-western Iberian Peninsula coast is particularly interesting to study distribution shifts as it features a strong latitude thermal gradient, establishing a biogeographical transitional region where several cold- and warmadapted species have their equatorward or poleward distributions. In the early 2000s, it appeared that, while warm-water species were already responding to warming, cold-water species did not display a coherent response. It is now necessary to gather up-to-date data on the distribution of the same group of species to understand if current patterns of change confirm or deny those observed back then, which may give us important clues about the mechanisms setting species limits in the area. New information This study provides a fine-scale description of the occurrence of intertidal macroalgae species in the rocky shores of the north-western Iberian coast. Specifically, the spatial distribution and semi-quantitative abundance of 34 native and invasive species were assessed at 70 wave-exposed locations. This included 19 species of cold-water affinity, 10 species of warm-water affinity and five neutral species. When contrasted with historical observations, these new data can be used to quantify and map biodiversity change in the region, as well as help understanding the mechanisms constraining species distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The unprecedented rates of current biodiversity loss have motivated a renewed interest in environmental and biodiversity monitoring. The need for sustained monitoring strategies has prompted not only the establisment of new long-term monitoring programmes, but also the rescue of data from historical or otherwise archived sources. Amongst the most valuable datasets are those containing information on intertidal systems, as they are particularly well suited for studying the biological effects of climate change. The Portuguese rocky coast is quite interesting for studying the effects of climate change on the distribution of species due to its geographical orientation, latitudinal patterns in temperature, species richness, species' distribution patterns and availability of historical information. This work aims at providing a comprehensive picture of the distribution and abundance of intertidal macro-invertebrates and macro-algae along the Portuguese rocky coast in the early 2000s. New information: This study provides a description of the rocky shore intertidal biodiversity of the mainland Portuguese coast in the early 2000s. The spatial distribution and semi-quantitative abundance of a total of 238 taxa were assessed at 49 wave-exposed locations. These data provide a comprehensive baseline against which biodiversity changes can be effectively and objectively evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a dataset of polychaetes (Annelida) from 14 midlittoral rocky shore sampling sites in Greece and Italy (Mediterranean Sea). The dataset combines the outcome of four different projects studying the hard substrate midlittoral zone in the Mediterranean between 1984 and 2009. Samples were collected by scraping and collecting the organisms from a framed area. The maximal sampling depth was 1.5 m. In total, 123 polychaete species were recorded, five of which are new records for the respective biogeographic sectors of the Mediterranean. The dataset contains 788 occurrence records, fully annotated with all required metadata. These data contribute to the knowledge of a previously very understudied regional habitat, since at present, comprehensive lists of the midlittoral communities in the Mediterranean are provided through only a few, paper-based, studies. This dataset is one of the first electronic data compilations of the Mediterranean midlittoral zone communities and certainly the most comprehensive of its kind, contributing to the ongoing efforts of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) which aims at filling the gaps in our current knowledge of the world's oceans. It is accessible at http://ipt.vliz.be/resource.do?r=mediterraneanpolychaetaintertidal.