“…Many studies have demonstrated the potential of foraminifera to reflect environmental changes of coastal and open marine systems on soft sediments (e.g., Alve, 1995;Burone et al, 2006;Mojtahid et al, 2006;Frontalini et al, 2009;Frontalini & Coccioni, 2011;Martins et al, 2013Martins et al, , 2016Martins et al, , 2019Bergamin et al, 2019). In Norwegian fjords, it has been shown that benthic foraminiferal communities significantly correlate with benthic macrofaunal communities, confirming that foraminifera can be as good sentinels of environmental conditions as macrofaunal (Bouchet et al, 2018a). Furthermore, foraminiferal indices based on diversity (Alve et al, 2009; and on the sensitivity of species to organic pollution (Barras et al, 2014;Dimiza et al, 2016;Alve et al, 2016; have been designed, and successfully applied to assess ecological quality statuses Dolven et al, 2013;Barras et al, 2014;Francescangeli et al, 2016;Dijkstra et al, 2017;Bouchet et al, 2018b;Jesus et al, 2018;Alve et al, 2019;Melis et al, 2019).…”