Research interests Ecology of microalgae and functional phytoplankton groups. Taxonomy of cyanobacteria. Evolutionary and ecological relationships between cyanobacteria and environmental constraints. Environmental and biotic mechanisms favouring the development of toxic cyanobacteria (including the appearence of new species and blooms), and identification and impact of cyanotoxins on water utilisation. The detection of toxigenic cyanobacteria in waterbodies is made using both culture dependent (PCR, sequencing and phylogenetics on isolated strains) and culture independent (NGS) approaches. Microbial communities in freshwater ecosystems using High Throughput Sequencing technologies. Impact of atmospheric modes of variability (Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean area) on the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of freshwater ecosystems. Long-Term Ecological Research (International LTER Research ). Specific topic: – Long term limnological studies in Lake Garda (the lake is included in the International-LTER network). Data are analysed using a wide spectrum of approaches based on R statistical packages (multivariate analyses, GLM, mixed models, additive models, time series; phylogenetic analyses) and (for metagenomics) advanced bioinformatic pipelines in LINUX and R.