Multiscale spatial distribution of macrofauna response to fishery pressure
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Marine Biology
- Keywords
- benthos response, North Sea, spatio-temporal scales, fishery pressure
- Copyright
- © 2018 Fiorentino 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
- 2018. Multiscale spatial distribution of macrofauna response to fishery pressure. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26709v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26709v1
Abstract
Trawling is one of the most damaging activities for fauna living at the ocean resulting in simultaneous pulse and chronic impacts on benthic communities on multiple spatio-temporal scales. Recently, high quality Vessel Monitoring by Satellite (VMS) data provides spatio-temporal information of swept area by fishery trawlers. Using this huge amount of information in combination with about 20 environmental descriptors, we aim to tease apart the effect of species endogenous features (i.e. dispersal capability) and exogenous factors (i.e. environmental conditions) on the fauna responses to fishery and its related spatial scales. We analyse data of 300 grab-samples taken in the German Bight (North Sea), encompassing 140 macrobenthic species collected on a regular grid over an area of about 8000 km2. We use Moran Eigenvector Maps to model patterns of potential connectivity between locations and shed light on which spatial scales fisheries, environmental characteristics, and macrobenthos are linked. Finally, we show maps of fauna response to fishery. We argue that despite the importance of proper quantification of fishing pressure and other human activities, shedding light on the effects and response to such activities is crucial for a sound understanding of the processes that shape ecosystems and diversity distribution
Author Comment
This is an abstract which has been accepted for the WCMB” (for abstracts)