Disentangling the effect of space, time, and environmental and anthropogenic drivers on coastal macrobenthic β diversity in contrasting habitats over 15 years.

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  • Additional Information
    • Source:
      Publisher: Elsevier Country of Publication: Netherlands NLM ID: 0330500 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1879-1026 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00489697 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Sci Total Environ Subsets: MEDLINE
    • Publication Information:
      Original Publication: Amsterdam, Elsevier.
    • Subject Terms:
      Biodiversity* ; Ecosystem* ; Environmental Monitoring*; Animals ; Invertebrates/physiology ; Anthropogenic Effects ; Atlantic Ocean
    • Abstract:
      Coastal zones are biodiversity hotspots and deliver essential ecosystem functions and services, yet they are exposed to multiple and interacting anthropogenic and environmental constraints. The individual and cumulative effects of these constraints on benthic communities, a key component of coastal ecosystems, and their variability across space and time, remains to be thoroughly quantified to guide conservation actions. Here, we explored how the presence of biogenic habitats influences the response of benthic communities to natural and anthropogenic constraints. We investigated this effect in both intertidal and subtidal habitats exposed to different pressures. We used data collected in the North-East Atlantic over 15 years (2005-2019) as part of the REBENT monitoring program, covering 38 sites of bare sediments, intertidal seagrass beds and maerl beds. We collected a range of environmental variables and proxies of anthropogenic pressures and used variation and hierarchical partitioning with redundancy analyses to estimate their relative effect on macrobenthic communities. We used descriptors modeling spatial and temporal structures (dbMEMs) to explore the scale of their effects and potential missing predictors. The selected variables explained between 53 % and 64 % of macrobenthic β diversity depending on habitat and depth. Fishing pressures, sedimentary and hydrodynamics variables stood out as the most important predictors across all habitats while proxies of anthropogenic pressures were overall more important in intertidal habitats. In the intertidal, presence of biogenic habitat strongly modulated the amount of explained variance and the identity of the selected variable. Across both tidal levels, analysis of models' residuals further indicated that biogenic habitats might mitigate the effect of extreme environmental events. Our study provides a hierarchy of the most important drivers of benthic communities across different habitats and tidal levels, emphasizing the prominence of anthropogenic pressures on intertidal communities and the role of biogenic habitats in mitigating environmental changes.
      Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
      (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)
    • Contributed Indexing:
      Keywords: Abiotic forcing; Benthos; Biogenic habitats; Long-term monitoring; Spatiotemporal dynamics; Variation partitioning
    • Publication Date:
      Date Created: 20240618 Date Completed: 20240720 Latest Revision: 20240720
    • Publication Date:
      20240720
    • Accession Number:
      10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.173919
    • Accession Number:
      38889817