Is the meiofauna a good indicator for climate change and anthropogenic impacts?

By D. Zeppilli, J. Sarrazin, D. Leduc, P. M. Arbizu, D. Fontaneto, C. Fontanier, A. Gooday, R. Kristensen, V. Ivanenko, M. Sørensen and 28 more. Marine Biodiversity, 2015

271 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Our planet is changing, and one of the most pressing challenges facing the scientific community revolves around understanding how ecological communities respond to global changes. From coastal to deep-sea ecosystems, ecologists are exploring new areas of research to find model organisms that help predict the future of life on our planet. Among the different categories of organisms, meiofauna offer several advantages for the study of marine benthic ecosystems. This paper reviews the advances in the study of meiofauna with regard to climate change and anthropogenic impacts. Four taxonomic groups are valuable for predicting global changes: foraminifers (especially calcareous forms), nematodes, copepods and ostracods. Environmental variables are fundamental in the interpretation of meiofaunal patterns and multistressor experiments are more informative than single stressor ones, revealing complex ecological and biological interactions. Global change has a general negative effect on meiofauna, with important consequences on benthic food webs. However, some meiofaunal species can be favoured by the extreme conditions induced by global change, as they can exhibit remarkable physiological adaptations. This review highlights the need to incorporate studies on taxonomy, genetics and function of meiofaunal taxa into global change impact research.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a6b3a624a1c1864ca467d0b74008500f72f0cc0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

1. A. Vanreusel
2. A. Gooday
3. Zhi-qiang Zhang

In Oceanography

1. A. Vanreusel
2. R. Neves
3. R. Kristensen
4. D. Zeppilli
5. D. Fontaneto
6. A. Gooday
7. M. Sørensen

Citations in the corpus

• Characteristics of meiofauna in extreme marine ecosystems: a review (2018, methodology): “Several experiments were performed on theMARwith paired wood and slate panels deployed at different localities in close proximity to visible hydrothermal activity (Cuvelier et al. 2014; Zeppilli et al. 2015a; Plum et al. 2017).”