Source Themes

Habitat Attributes Dictate the Roles of Dispersal and Environmental Filtering on Metacommunity Assembly at Coastal Soft‑Bottom Ecosystems

Tracking the effects of habitat attributes on species distribution is pivotal to the understanding of community assembly across space and time. We used the elements of metacommunity (EMS), which evaluates coherence, turnover, and boundary clumping of …

Identifying “vital attributes” for assessing disturbance–recovery potential of seafloor communities

Despite a long history of disturbance–recovery research, we still lack a generalizable understanding of the attributes that drive community recovery potential in seafloor ecosystems. Marine soft-sediment ecosystems encompass a range of heterogeneity …

Responses of the macrobenthic community to the Dalian Bay oil spill based on co-occurrence patterns and interaction networks

On July 16, 2010, a pipeline explosion spilled 1500 tons of crude oil into the Port of Dalian, China. To identify taxa responses to the spill, we exploited seven years of monitoring data to examine the co-occurrence of taxon pairs and the variation …

Coupled effects of environment, space and ecological engineering on seafloor beta‐diversity

One of the challenges in modern ecology is reconciling how biotic interactions and abiotic factors are interwoven drivers of community assembly. β-diversity is a measure of the variation in species composition across space and time. The drivers of …

Composition and abundance of benthic microalgae from the Estuarine Complex of Paranaguá Bay (southern Brazil) with special emphasis on toxic species

This study addressed the occurrence and distribution of benthic microalgae, with emphasis on toxic species, on different substrates (macroalgae, seagrass and sediments) along the outer, euhaline zone of the Estuarine Complex of Paranaguá Bay, …

segRDA: An r package for performing piecewise redundancy analysis

Redundancy analysis is widely used to correlate species matrix against environmental descriptors. This analysis assumes that the response variables have the same continuous linear trend over the whole gradient, which is often not the case. To …

Future ocean climate homogenizes communities across habitats through diversity loss and rise of generalist species

Predictions of the effects of global change on ecological communities are largely based on single habitats. Yet in nature, habitats are interconnected through the exchange of energy and organisms, and the responses of local communities may not extend …

Large-scale distribution patterns of mangrove nematodes: A global meta-analysis

Mangroves harbor diverse invertebrate communities, suggesting that macroecological distribution patterns of habitat‐forming foundation species drive the associated faunal distribution. Whether these are driven by mangrove biogeography is still …

Bioturbation by the sand dollar Encope emarginata (Echinoidea, Mellitidae) changes the composition and size structure of microphytobenthic assemblages

To assess the effects of feeding and bioturbation by the sand dollar Encope emarginata on microphytobenthic structure, we have carried out a 10-day factorial mesocosm experiment. Four treatments were applied to discriminate between biological …

Distribution patterns of ectosymbiont crabs and their sand dollar hosts in a subtropical estuarine sandflat

Encope emarginata (Leske, 1778) are frequently observed aggregated in the sediment and variations in its spatial patterns of distribution may be a function of changes on local hydrodynamic regime. Tiny crabs, Dissodactylus crinitichelis Moreira, 1901 …