The differences in macrovegetation community structures between the transects, months and methods were assessed using ANOSIM (Clarke & Warwick 2001) in the statistical program PRIMER version 6.1.11 (Clarke & Corley 2006). The ANOSIM analyses were based on the Bray-Curtis similarity matrices of macrovegetation occurrence data. The test statistic R provided by ANOSIM reflects the differences in community structure between groups (e.g. transects, months or methods). An R value of 1 indicates that all samples within groups are more similar to each other than any pair of samples from different groups, i.e. there is a total separation between the groups. An R value of zero shows that similarities check details between

and within the groups are equal, i.e. no separation between the groups exists ( Clarke & Warwick 2001). According to Clarke & Corley (2006), an R value of less than 0.25 indicates that the separation between groups is negligible; an R value of 0.5 to 0.75 ABT-199 cell line shows overlapping but clearly differentiable groups, and an R value over 0.75 indicates well separated groups. The calculation of R and statistical significance (p) in ANOSIM was based on a random permutation (n = 9999) test ( Clarke & Warwick 2001). SIMPER analysis was used to describe the differences in the species composition of macrophytobenthos among the sample collection methods ( Clarke 1993). In order to study the possible selective influence

of hydrodynamics on various species and quantitative aspects of beach wrack, relationships between different variables of biological beach cast (distance from water edge, coverage inside the sampling frame, biomass of key species, total biomass, species number) and coastal hydrodynamic variables (sea level together with maximum

and average wave height and average alongshore current speed over the three averaging periods) were tested using Pearson correlation Pregnenolone analysis in the statistical program STATISTICA (StatSoft 2012). The data were tested for normality and homogeneity of variances before running correlation analysis using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test and Levene’s test respectively. While the sea level variations in the three study sites were rather synchronous and differed by less than 10–20 cm from one another (Figure 3), the differences in wave heights were more substantial. Orajõe, featuring relatively long (up to 130 km) fetches from the west, had combined sea level- wave heights of up to 2.8 m (Figure 3d), while the south-westerly (90 km) exposed Sõmeri got 2.5 m (Figure 3a) and the south-easterly (100 km) exposed Kõiguste only 2.2 m (Figure 3c) sea level-wave heights during the same period. The combined water height reached 4 metres during the stormy period in December 2011 (Figure 3a,b), but no biological samples were taken then. The combined sea level and wave height was relatively high (at least 1.5 m above mean sea level at Sõmeri, 1.2 m at Kõiguste and 1.