The European green crab (Carcinus maenas), native to northwestern Europe and Africa, is among the top 100 most damaging invasive species globally. In some regions, including the Atlantic coast of North America, C. maenas has caused long-term degradation of eelgrass habitats and bivalve, crab, and finfish populations, while areas are near the beginning of the invasion cycle. Due to high persistence and reproductive potential of C. maenas populations, most local and regional mitigation efforts no longer strive for extirpation and instead focus on population control. Long-term monitoring and rapid response protocols can facilitate early detection of introductions that is critical to inform management decisions related to green crab control or extirpation. Once C. maenas are detected, local area managers will need to decide on management actions, including whether and what green crab control measures will be implemented, if local invasion might be prevented or extirpated, and if population reduction to achieve functional eradication is achievable. Due to the immense operational demands likely required to extirpate C. maenas populations, combined with limited resources for monitoring and removal, it is unlikely that any single government, conservation and/or academic organization would be positioned to adequately control or extirpate populations in local areas, highlighting the importance of collaborative efforts. Community-based monitoring, and emerging methods such as environmental DNA (eDNA), may help expand the spatial and temporal extent of monitoring, facilitating early detection and removal of C. maenas. While several C. maenas removal programs have succeeded in reducing their populations, to our knowledge, no program has yet successfully extirpated the invader; and the cost of any such program would likely be immense and unsustainable over the long-term. An alternative approach is functional eradication, whereby C. maenas populations are reduced below threshold levels such that ecosystem impacts are minimized. Less funding and effort would likely be required to achieve and maintain functional eradication compared to extirpation. In either case, continual control efforts will be required as C. maenas populations can quickly increase from low densities and larval re-introductions.
Infauna have an intimate relationship with the sediments they inhabit, and any study conducted upon infauna must, at the very least, describe sediment conditions. Common sediment assessments in intertidal systems include particle size distribution, as well as water and organic matter contents. These measures require extracting and processing a sediment core, and this disturbance may result in data that do not necessarily reflect in situ conditions. Sediment penetrability measured in situ using a penetrometer can circumvent this limitation. However, relationships between sediment penetrability and other sediment variables are poorly understood, especially in coastal systems. We evaluated the relationship between sediment penetrability and depth to the apparent redox potential discontinuity, mean particle size, organic matter content, and water content on tidal flats along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of Canada. We also assessed whether adding penetrability into environmental models of the infaunal community improved model performance. We observed that while penetrability is statistically related to other sediment variables, relationships to covariates were weak. Further, inclusion of penetrability with other sediment variables improved the performance of models predicting infaunal community composition. Therefore, penetrability can be considered a separate variable, and contributes to an integrated assessment of environmental conditions experienced by biota. Finally, since we evaluated this method in different soft-sediment intertidal ecosystems (mudflats to sandflats), this method is applicable to a range of systems in other geographical areas.
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