Plankton communities in the Eastern Mediterranean coastal waters

Plankton in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea has got a relatively poor study c ompared to that in the other regions of the basin. The available data mostl y cover the central and the northern parts of the Levantine basin [5, 10, 1 3]. The data on the plankton in the Eastern Mediterranean coastal waters an d closely adjacent areas are very few. Most of them were presented by Abi-S aab and Lakkis [1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9]. The studies by Abi-Saab and Lakkis ere d one in the Lebanese coastal waters and focused on taxonomic composition and temporal/spatial variability of the plankton community in the surface laye r only. The Eastern Mediterranean coastal waters lack any representative sampling o f phyto- and zooplankton within the depth range sufficient for an adequate evaluation of their total numbers and biomass as well as peculiarities of t heir vertical distribution. In the Syrian coastal waters and adjacent areas no plankton studies had been done until the early 1990's.