Distinctly variable mudscapes: Distribution gradients of intertidal macrofauna across the Dutch Wadden Sea☆
By T. J. Compton, S. Holthuijsen, A. Koolhaas, Anne Dekinga, J. Horn, Jeremy Smith, Ysbrand Galama, Maarten Brugge, D. Wal, Jaap van der Meer and 2 more. 2013
164 citations recorded by the source corpus.
article The Wadden Sea is a shallow coastal region, with a large area of sedimentary tidal flats that extends from The Netherlands to Denmark and has been declared a site of international importance in the Dutch and German parts (Ramsar status and UNESCO World Heritage Site). Benthic macrofauna are central to the ecosystem functioning of this area, as they recycle nutrients, decompose organic matter and are an important food source for many secondary consumers, like fish and waterbirds. Due to the environmental gradients charac- teristic of estuarine systems, it is expected that changes in assemblage composition will be observed across the physical and environmental gradients of the Wadden Sea. First, we explored the spatial variation in as- semblage composition of benthic macrofauna across the intertidal part of the Dutch Wadden Sea using 3 years of biomass data. Then, we identified the relative importance of six environmental variables for explaining and predicting changes in assemblage composition across the intertidal areas of the Wadden Sea using generalised dissimilarity modelling (GDM). In accordance with the environmental gradients across this system, the biomass contributed by a few common species differed from west to east and were distinct in the Dollard. In the west, bivalves Mya arenaria, Cerastoderma edule and Ensis directus contributed a relatively large and equal share of the total biomass, whereas C. edule contributed the sole largest share of the total bio- mass towards the east. The polychaete Alitta succinea became a large share of the total biomass in the upper Ems and in the Dollard estuary, but contributed little elsewhere. Similar to the observed differences in species composition, the spatial patterns in assemblage composition, as predicted by the GDM models, identified the Dollard as distinct and that the prevalence of assemblage types in the west differed to the east. Median grain size, followed by microphytobenthic biomass, and exposure time were the most important variables describ- ing differences in assemblage composition. That the Wadden Sea forms a heterogeneous landscape where as- semblage composition varies across multiple gradients has repercussions for management and monitoring. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Subfields: Ecology, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9cd7394dc792dceea3ccab48574a6de99827573
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Citations in the corpus
- The large-scale impact of offshore wind farm structures on pelagic primary productivity in the southern North Sea (2017, methodology): “Comparison to Wadden Sea field data compiled by Compton et al (2013), however, indicated that predicted shallow-water mussel abundance was greatly overestimated, which can be attributed to a positive sampling bias in the citizen-science data set.”