Monitoring long-term spatial and temporal trends of the infaunal community characteristics along the shallow waters of the Mediterranean coast of Israel Hadas Lubinevsky & Barak Herut & Moshe Tom Received: 15 April 2019 /Accepted: 10 October 2019 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Abstract Sandy sediment and its infauna were annual- ly sampled along the shallow waters of the Israeli coast during the 2005–2016 period, as a part of the Israeli National Environmental Program framework, aiming to detect anthropogenic interference in that province by monitoring changes in the species composition, abun- dance, and diversity of the infaunal communities and in accompanied abiotic parameters: the levels of total or- ganic carbon and a series of heavy metals and the site- specific grain size distribution. The > 250-μm fraction of the fauna was segregated from the sampled sediment and was identified to species or higher taxonomic level. Three spatial biotopes were determined based on their unique faunal composition, Haifa Bay, Haifa harbor, and the southern coast. Species homogeneity among samples of each biotope was evaluated. Temporal and spatial changes of the species composition, abundance, and diversity were calculated for each biotope, mostly revealing random annual fluctuations. Only two minor temporal trends were observed: two spatially identical and temporally different faunal communities in the southern coast biotope, distinguishing the 2005–2007 and 2008–2016 periods, and a slight increase in the number of species across time in the two Haifa Bay provinces. Total organic carbon was highly correlated to the faunal composition with the highest organic car- bon levels in the Haifa harbor biotope. The biotopes’ mutually occurring abundant species were sufficient to determine biotope borders and the contribution of inter- mittently sampled rare species, including the zoogeo- graphically Indo-Pacific originated ones was feeble, important only to identify species migration and faunis- tics. Practically, three sampling sites along the Israeli shallow soft substrate, corresponding to the defined spatial biotopes, are sufficient to monitor the effect of environmental changes. Seasonal sampling twice a year is recommended as well as more accurate species iden- tification using molecular taxonomy. Keywords Marine fauna . Species composition . Abundance . Species diversity . Biotopes . Sandy bottom Introduction The ~ 190-km Israeli Mediterranean coast is intensively used for a variety of purposes, such as harbor and anchorage facilities, cooling of power stations, desali- nation plants, purified sewage disposal, gas pipelines, fisheries, recreation, and military activities. A striking feature of this coast is the Lessepsian migration, an invasion of taxa of Indo-Pacific biogeographic origin into the Mediterranean continental shelf, an environ- ment which formerly belonged to the Mediterranean– East Atlantic province (Galil 2004). The studied area is exposed to anthropogenic stress (Herut and Galil 2000; Environ Monit Assess (2019) 191:724 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-019-7872-7 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-019-7872-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. H. Lubinevsky (*) : B. Herut : M. Tom Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research, P.O. Box 8030, 31080 Haifa, Israel e-mail: hadas@ocean.org.il