The new web page of AMBI (AZTI Marine Biotic Index), the tool for measuring the Marine Biotic Index devised by AZTI-Tecnalia, has meant that this technological centre is at the head of research into benthic indicators for evaluating the quality of the marine environment in environmental impact studies and for the Water Framework Directive (WFD). The new platform incorporates novel functions that facilitate the downloading of the tool as well as the interaction of users through a forum.

The AMBI software, developed in 2000 and which has been updated a number of times, is based on ecological paradigms that enable establishing the ecological quality of the coasts and estuaries through the assignation of seabed species to one of five ecological groups. Moreover, it incorporates a multi-variant analysis (M-AMBI) for the calculation of the ecological state of the WFD. These tools explore the response of communities to the natural and human changes in the quality of water, integrating long-term environmental conditions. Besides calculating the AMBI index, this programme graphically represents the data and exports the results.

Version 4.1, dating from July 2009, enables working with an unlimited number of samples in the calculations and includes almost 5,900 species from the seabed benthic zone and which are representative of the most important marine communities present in the estuaries and coastal systems of Europe, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and even North America, South America and Southeast Asia.

The AMBI tool has had great scientific and technical success to date, as it has been routinely employed throughout Europe (from Norway to Greece), but also in other parts of the world, such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, China, Indonesia, Reunion Island, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, the USA and Canada. Moreover, M-AMBI is being used for the evaluation of the quality of benthos, within the WFD, in many European countries, such as France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Italy and Slovenia.

Further information: Dr. Ángel Borja This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Translation: Basque Research

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