Description of the three shallow estuaries: Mondego River (Portugal), Roskilde Fjord (Denmark) and the Lagoon of Venice (Italy)

The paper describes three European estuaries which were compared with respect to the dynamics between autotrophic components under the MUST-project: The Mondego River (M) (Portugal), Roskilde Fjord (R) (Denmark) and Venice Lagoon (V) (Italy). The areas of the three estuaries are (M) 3.4, (R) 125 and (V) 540 km2 and their maximum tidal ranges are (M) 3.3, (R) 0.2 and (V) 2.2 m. They are all eutrophic with high loadings of nitrogen (M) 126 t N/yr, (R) 2500 t N/yr and (V) 7000 t N/yr and high loadings of phosphorus (M) 1 t P/yr, (R) 180 t P/yr and (V) 1000 t P/yr. The dominating phytoplankton species are (M) diatoms and dinoflagellates, (R) Skeletonema sp. and (V) Amphora sp. and Chaetocerus sp. and the dominating macrophytes are (M) Enteromorpha sp., Gracilaria sp. and Zostera noltii, (R) Zostera marina and Ulva lactuca and (V) Ulva rigida and Zostera noltii. All three estuaries are frequently exposed to collapses caused by severe oxygen depletion.