Fig 1.
A schematic map indicating the locations of the Hadera, Sorek, and Ashkelon desalination facilities (top, middle and lower images, respectively) along the southeastern Mediterranean Israeli coastline. The locations of the outfall and control stations at each desalination facility are shown with circles (specific locations are detailed in Table 1). The distance between the Hadera and Sorek desalination facilities is ~60 km, while the distance between Sorek and Ashkelon is ~40 km. The picture was taken by C. Kenigsberg.
Table 1.
The locations of the outfall and control stations at each one of the three desalination facilities: Ashkelon, Hadera, and Sorek.
Fig 2.
Seasonal environmental measurements.
Bottom-water salinities, temperatures, and the grain size mode at each desalination facility.
Table 2.
Environmental parameters measurements.
Fig 3.
Foraminiferal total abundance (top) from June 2016-April 2017, calculated from the number of individuals per sample (N) divided by the sample's dry weight (grams). Species richness (bottom), calculated by the number of species in each sample. The X and circles represent the averages of the outfall and control respectably. Solid lines represent the standard deviation of triplicate samples. Two-way ANOVA was performed for each index at each site; the results (statistic F and probability P-value) are presented on each diagram. Significant differences are presented in bold.
Fig 4.
Cumulative relative abundances (%).
Represented by the averages from the triplicate of the most common species (>5% for at least one station) at the control stations (top) and the outfall stations (bottom), divided into three sampling sites: Ashkelon, Hadera, and Sorek. Four sampling periods: June 2016 (summer), November 16 (fall), January 17 (winter), and April 17 (spring).
Fig 5.
Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) based on foraminiferal relative abundance.
The nMDS is showing similarity distances between the three sites and stations. Each mark represents one sample. All replicates and sampling seasons are shown. Stress <0.2 results in a potentially useful 2-dimensional picture [46].
Fig 6.
A1-A3. nMDS plots based on foraminiferal assemblages. Show the dissimilarity distance matrix between the outfall and control station at each site. Each mark represents one sample. All replicates are shown. Samples with exceptional abundance or species richness values are circled. B1-B3. PCA plots of the environmental data. The vector presented only if the correlation is > 0.9. The specific variable values for contribution are detailed in Table 3.
Table 3.
Results of ANOSIM and PCA.
Fig 7.
Differences in relative abundances of selected foraminiferal species between the outfall to the control.
The nMDS plot shows the dissimilarity distance between stations, with a bobble projection of the abundances of selected foraminiferal species at each desalination facility site: Ashkelon, Hadera, and Sorek from left to right. The size of the circle represents the numerical abundance (N/g) after logarithmic transformation (log(x+1)) of the data. An X indicates the total absence of the species in a sample. Red indicates the outfall station, and beige indicates the control station. Each mark represents one sample. All triplicate samples and seasons are shown.