Long-term trends in soft-bottom fauna based on 30 years biodiversity monitoring systems

Aquatic Environment and Quality Research Area, Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO), Oostende, Belgium
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.26684v1
Subject Areas
Biodiversity, Ecology, Marine Biology
Keywords
time series, ecosystem changes, Belgian part of the North Sea, soft-bottom ecosystem
Copyright
© 2018 De Backer et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
De Backer A, Van Hoey G, Hostens K. 2018. Long-term trends in soft-bottom fauna based on 30 years biodiversity monitoring systems. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26684v1

Abstract

Situated within the southern North Sea, the Belgian marine realm forms a unique marine ecosystem, characterized by shallow sandbanks and gullies. Like in other systems, human activities intensified strongly during the past decades.

From 1984 onwards, several locations (outside direct human impact) were yearly sampled for macrobenthos, epibenthos and demersal fish in autumn. This provided a unique dataset to study natural variability over time within the soft-bottom ecosystem. Both coastal and offshore assemblages of each ecosystem component were sampled, which permitted to detect if the coastal and offshore area changed differently over time within one ecosystem component. Furthermore, these long-term data enabled to identify whether the different ecosystem components showed similar or different trends over time. Observed changes were linked to physical and climate-related environmental variables.

Overall, the soft-bottom ecosystem possessed high ecological stability over time. Nevertheless, a shift in both the coastal macrobenthos and the offshore demersal fish assemblage was revealed around the year 2004. Shifts in offshore demersal fish could be related to climate parameters, while the coastal macrobenthic shift was mainly related to physical changes. Other trends were only apparent at the species level for instance typical southern species showed distinct increases since the late 90’s.

Author Comment

This abstract is part of the conference proceedings of WCMB 2018