Benthic marine diatoms from French coastal and transitional waters

Study Extent

Compilation of the historic records of marine and brackish diatom current species and genera reported for French coastal areas since the last quarter of the 19th century.

Sampling

Data inventory and compilation: Data sources were identified based on literature research and web-based search engines (e.g., Google or Web of Science). Both English and French languages were used when entering key terms during the search process, which included terms such as “diatoms” or “microphytobenthos” and was limited geographically to metropolitan France. The applicable data sources were digitally available in pdf format or in paper. Relevant information was manually transferred to a standard format in MS Excel.

Quality Control

Each taxonomic entry is unique, as it refers to a single taxonomic unit found in each one of the 49 references used in the dataset and reported for a specific location (at one to four geographical levels). A thorough cross-checking of species names and clean-up of duplicates was made. In order to standardize the taxonomic entries, the nomenclatural format of the taxa found in the original sources was adapted to the one used in DiatomBase and the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), thanks to the taxon match option available on the website of the latter (www.marinespecies.org). DiatomBase (Kociolek et al. 2022) is primarily a nomenclatural database that updated and extended the Catalogue of Diatom Names (Fourtanier and Kociolek 2011), but it is also an authoritative open-access reference system for diatom taxa, which is universally recognized, and it is edited by 23 taxonomic editors world-wide. It is managed by VLIZ and shares with WoRMS a unique identifier, known as the AphiaID, for every species name. This identifier enables to link the species name to an internationally accepted standardized name and associated taxonomic information, such as accepted names, synonyms and current classification. The linkage of the current dataset to DiatomBase/WoRMS was made through a “worms” R package (version 0.2.2, J. Holstein 2018) that allows to retrieve the taxonomic information available for each AphiaID. The dataset was adjusted to the Darwin Core specifications (Wieczorek et al. 2012) in order to be published in the GBIF network.

Method steps

1. NA

Diatoms (Bacillariophyceae) are listed to genus or species level. Nomenclature follows DiatomBase and higher classification is according to Cox (2015).

1. Bacillariophyceae
   common name: Diatoms rank: class

metropolitan France