Benthic organisms as an ecological tool for monitoring coastal and marine ecosystem health

Globally marine ecosystems are getting increasingly stressed from human activities that require continuous monitoring to understand their ecological status and effective implementation of management measures. Benthic organisms are considered one of the best indicators for environmental change. Based on this ecological sensitivity of benthic species, many indices are developed and are being increasingly used in benthic monitoring programs. However, most of these indices are not efficient in ecological quality assessment to different ecological conditions. Therefore many of these indices are still under improvement and validation to specific geographical locations or conditions. AZTI’s marine biotic index (AMBI), multivariate-AMBI (M-AMBI), BENTIX, and benthic opportunistic polychaetes/amphipods ratio were the most commonly used efficient benthic biotic indices for coastal monitoring programs around the globe, which are based on the ecological sensitivity of benthic species. Recent studies have focused on the development of indices aided with modern methods like microarray, real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction, metabarcoding, remote sensing, acoustic, and in situ monitoring methods because such procedures are much faster and cheaper than conventional methods.