Alan Deidun, senior lecturer at the International Ocean Institute – Malta Operational Centre (IOI-MOC), was among 500 delegates attending the 13th International Coastal Symposium in Plymouth, UK, to present the outcome of two separate scientific studies.

The first study focused on elucidating the geographical distribution of different beach sediment median grain sizes around the coastline of the Maltese Islands, while refining the image analysis protocol to be used as an alternative method to the conventional sieving and microscopic analysis in measuring sediment particle parameters.

In fact, the same study measured the beach particle median diameter for sediment collected from 57 different beaches around the Maltese Islands using three different techniques – sieving, microscopic analysis and image analysis – evaluating the degree of concordance between the three techniques.

This study also saw the participation of John Schembri and Ritienne Gauci from the Department of Geography and Adam Gauci from the IOI-MOC .

The second study attempted to classify different coastal water bodies around the Maltese Islands in terms of their Chlorophyll a content by retrieving a decadal (2002-2011) series of ocean colour data from remote sensing.

The study adopted the same nine coastal water bodies (MTC1-MTC9) designated in terms of the Water Framework Directive by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority and investigated whether any significant spatial or temporal differences in Chlorophyll a content existed, through the use of Permanova and pair-wise tests.

The conclusions of this study included the fact that the Maltese coastal waters are relatively homogenous in terms of Chlorophyll a content, with all the nine coastal water bodies falling in the same Chlorophyll a content bracket for each season during the 10 years under investigation.

Despite this, some differences between individual coastal water bodies did emerge, with the water bodies directly affected by coastal discharges and other anthropogenic activities exhibiting higher Chlorophyll a content values during the spring and summer seasons of 2010 and 2011.

Taking part in this study were Joel Azzopardi and Adam Gauci from IOI-MOC.

Both papers will eventually be published in the Journal of Coastal Research.

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