Foraminiferal communities from three stations on the French Mediterranean coast to test density separation methods

The data present foraminiferal counts from three stations sampled between the 2nd and the 8th April 2015.  These data were collected as part of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) survey on the French Mediterranean coast (DCE4-1 campaign). The primary use of these foraminiferal data is to evaluate the environmental quality of coastal environment of the French Mediterranean coast. More particularly these data were used to test the efficiency of density separation methods to extract foraminifera from sandy samples in biomonitoring studies. A Reineck box-corer was used to sampled surface sediment and at each station three replicates were taken (i.e., different box-corer launch). Each replicate was sub-cored (7.45 cm diameter) and the top 0-1 centimetre was stained with Rose Bengal at 2 g.L-1 and preserved in 96% ethanol. In the laboratory samples were washed through 63, 125, 150, and 500 µm sieves. The 125–150 µm and the 150–500 µm fractions were both split in two with a Folsom wet splitter. Different density separation methods were applied on each split. These density separations were carrying out using different high-density liquids (i.e., TCE: Trichloroethylene; ZC: Zinc Chloride; SPT: Sodium Polytungstate), at different density (i.e., 1.46, 1.7, 2.1, 2.3, and 2.5). In the database, the sample volume corresponds to the total volume of sediment in millilitre before sieving, and the split volume corresponds to the volume of each split in millilitre. See Parent et al. 2018 for a full description of the method.