Benthic foraminifera of the Tangier coast: Biodiversity, distribution, and environmental bio-indication

This study presents a modern method for evaluating environmental conditions along the coast of Tangier by using the benthic foraminifera as biological indicators of marine ecological health in Morocco. These small organisms are particularly valuable for this bio-indication purpose due to their quick rection to environmental variations, furthermore, they have a short life cycle, which makes them reliable signals of environment condition, our research focussed on Tangier Bay; for that we took seven surface sediments samples in October 2021, the samples went through washing, picking, species identification, while we also analysed the sediments itself for the grain size and also for the total organic carbon (TOC). The results showed that foraminiferal abundance diverse between 229 and 335 individuals/50 ml; with hyaline types dominating at 87.09%. Elphidium crispum was by far the most common species (59.2%). The using of the multivariate statistical techniques like Correspondence Analysis (CA) and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) revealed that sediment texture plays a key role in shaping how these communities are distributed. Overall, we can say that this detailed approach can help guide smarter sustainable management by bringing essential baseline information so we can do an evaluation to the ecological health of Morocco's coastal environments.