Desalination impacts on microbial coastal populations

The increasing importance and expansion of seawater desalination technologies and large scale coastal plants – enhances both the “visibility” and essentiality of ensuring environmental sustainability of the impacted coastlines. Our study (2015-2019) added important knowledge to the scant information that has been published either locally or globally to examine the impacts of desalination discharges on the coastal microbial communities comprising the foundation of the aquatic food webs. Our overarching goal in this project was to characterize and predict the responses of microbial and phytoplankton communities to their exposure to both enhanced salinities and chemical discharges resulting from desalination plants.  Read More in the publications…

Site-specific monitoring and assessment of changes of the microbial populations is essential. Moreover, Coastal environments, exposed to long term discharge of brine, may exhibit cumulative chronic effects and affect the ecosystems more dramatically. The assessment of ecological impacts, from the rapidly expanding desalination industry, on coastal marine environments and their biota should be included as a routine monitoring tool and not be based solely on the results of short term studies such as this one.