Biomonitoring has been in practice for few decades, yet has become an urgent matter during the past few years due to increase awareness of possible impact of anthropogenic stressors on marine communities. Living foraminifera are considered as one of the most powerful tools for biomonitoring modern oceans. Several monitoring projects on modern marine environments have already been completed in my laboratory, that combined both field and laboratory experiments, and geochemical analyses. The most recent ones focus on the use of foraminifera geochemistry for monitoring heavy metals pollution.

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The establishment of sustainable coastal industries requires better temporal and spatial monitoring of heavy metal (HM) pollutants, even at low concentrations and during pulse-release events, before their accumulation becomes hazardous for local ecosystems or for the use of seawater in desalination (for drinking water). Foraminifera build their shells by sequential addition of chambers made of calcite, which contains impurities reflecting the composition of the growth medium. Therefore, the chemical composition of each chamber reflects heavy metals in the ambient water at the time of calcification.
In recent projects, we demonstrated the advantages of monitoring heavy metals using single chamber analyses of foraminifera for detecting short term events of heavy metal pollution in the coastal environment and demonstrated the applicability of both single-chamber and whole shell analyses of foraminifera shells as a tool for HM monitoring in seawater. ​​​​​

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​Collaborations
Barak Herut - Research Limnological & Oceanographic Israel Ltd.(PBC)​​
Adi Torfstein - Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and
InterUniversity Institute for Marine Sciences, Eilat, Israel
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