Assessment of Jessica oil spill impacts on intertidal invertebrate communities

Gelin, Agnès; Gravez, Vincent; Edgar, Graham J.

doi:10.1016/s0025-326x(03)00368-0

Cited by 24 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Therefore, low species richness observed in this study likely resulted from surveys being carried out during March 27-29, 2019, the peak of the warm season when productivity tends to be significantly lower than during subsequent colder and more productive months. Surveys reported by Gelin et al (2003) observed considerably higher species richness in Santa Cruz, possibly due to higher recruitment levels and macro algae percent cover, as surveys in their study were conducted during the onset of the productive season in the month of May ( 2001). Furthermore, surveys in Santa Cruz for this study were carried out in March 2019 and coinciding with El Niño (ONI +0.7) conditions.…”

Section: Latitudinal Diversity Patternsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Optimizing Large-Scale Biodiversity Sampling Effort: Toward an Unbalanced Survey Design

Montes¹,

Lefcheck²,

Guerra‐Castro³

et al. 2021

Oceanog

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Acquiring marine biodiversity data is difficult, costly, and time-consuming, making it challenging to understand the distribution and abundance of life in the ocean. Historically, approaches to biodiversity sampling over large geographic scales have advocated for equivalent effort across multiple sites to minimize comparative bias. When effort cannot be equalized, techniques such as rarefaction have been applied to minimize biases by reverting diversity estimates to equivalent numbers of samples or individuals. This often results in oversampling and wasted resources or inaccurately characterized communities due to undersampling. How, then, can we better determine an optimal survey design for characterizing species richness and community composition across a range of conditions and capacities without compromising taxonomic resolution and statistical power? Researchers in the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network Pole to Pole of the Americas (MBON Pole to Pole) are surveying rocky shore macroinvertebrates and algal communities spanning ~107° of latitude and 10 biogeographic ecoregions to address this question. Here, we apply existing techniques in the form of fixed-coverage subsampling and a complementary multivariate analysis to determine the optimal effort necessary for characterizing species richness and community composition across the network sampling sites. We show that oversampling for species richness varied between ~20% and 400% at over half of studied areas, while some locations were undersampled by up to 50%. Multivariate error analysis also revealed that most of the localities were oversampled by several-fold for benthic community composition. From this analysis, we advocate for an unbalanced sampling approach to support field programs in the collection of high-quality data, where preliminary information is used to set the minimum required effort to generate robust values of diversity and composition on a site-to-site basis. As part of this recommendation, we provide statistical tools in the open-source R statistical software to aid researchers in implementing optimization strategies and expanding the geographic footprint or sampling frequency of regional biodiversity survey programs.

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Section: Latitudinal Diversity Patternsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Optimizing Large-Scale Biodiversity Sampling Effort: Toward an Unbalanced Survey Design

Montes¹,

Lefcheck²,

Guerra‐Castro³

et al. 2021

Oceanog

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“…Often factors other than oil largely determine community structure resulting in confounded effects of the spill. Thus, the study designs that do not include the measurement of other environmental factors or lack the baseline data must be interpreted with particular care [2,30]. As our study involved the key environmental variables and the structure of invertebrate communities in the design we were able to separate the effects of oil spills from other environmental forcing (both abiotic and biotic) and identify the interactive effects of oil spill and environmental variability on invertebrate communities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting ecological resilience of marine benthic communities facing a high risk of oil spills

Kotta¹,

Aps²,

Herkül³

2008

WIT Transactions on the Built Environment

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Ecosystem resilience emphasizes two different aspects of stability, i.e. the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbances (sensitivity) and rebuild itself when necessary (recovery). This paper examines the relationships between the magnitude of oil spill and the resilience of benthic invertebrate communities in the Gulf of Finland, Baltic Sea during 2006-2007. We analyzed whether and how depth, sediment type, topographic structure and exposure contributed to these relationships. Predictive spatial modelling was used to extrapolate the sensitivity of benthic invertebrate communities into the whole gulf scale based on the knowledge of the combined effects of environmental variability, oil exposure and biotic patterns. Predictive modelling provides managers with a useful and cost-efficient tool in reducing the potential oil spill related environmental risk by, e.g., redirecting shipping away from sites that have high sensitivity and low recovery potential, and by allocating sufficient oil combating resources to protect those areas in the case of oil accident.

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“…For instance, on the southern Atlantic shores, the structure of the intertidal community characterized by the tiny mussel Brachidontes rodriguezii , has been successfully used to detect environmental impact due to domestic sewage (López Gappa et al , 1990, 1993; Vallarino, 2002; Vallarino et al , 2002). Therefore, baseline information on benthic community structure is critical to avoid confounding the consequences of an impact, given the high level of variability in natural assemblages (Smith & Simpson, 1995; Gelin et al , 2003). Several authors have pointed out that pre-impact data are essential to understand effects of pollution such as an oil spill (Paine et al , 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Benthic diversity and assemblage structure of a north Patagonian rocky shore: a monitoring legacy of the NaGISA project

et al. 2013

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The rocky shore of Punta Este, Golfo Nuevo (Patagonia, Argentina), was sampled by means of the standardized NaGISA (CoML) protocol, that was aimed to generate biodiversity baseline data in six levels, from high intertidal to 10 m depth. Based on the generated data, we analysed the benthic assemblage structure, species richness, mean abundance and the distribution pattern of invertebrate functional groups, typifying species in each intertidal and subtidal level. The intertidal sampled is exposed to extreme physical conditions higher than any other rocky shore system studied, with air temperature variation of 40°C during the year, maximum winds of 90 km/h and semidiurnal tides of 5 m amplitude; on the other hand subtidal presents less thermal variation (ΔT 10°C throughout the year) and more homogeneous physical conditions. We identified 64 taxa represented by six animal phyla: Mollusca, Arthropoda, Annelida (Polychaeta), Echinodermata, Cnidaria and Nemertea; and three algal phyla: Chlorophyta, Rhodophyta and Heterokontophyta (class: Phaeophyceae). Ordination non-metric multidimensional scaling plots showed three different assemblages in terms of species composition (intertidal, subtidal 1 m level and subtidal 5–10 m levels). The intertidal was represented by suspension feeders, mainly Mollusca. The tiny mussels Brachidontes rodriguezii and Brachidontes purpuratus, and the algae Corallina officinalis dominated the intertidal and promote positive interaction (amelioration), preventing other species from the extreme physical stress. The subtidal was mainly represented by grazers. Our results showed a tendency of suspension feeders to decrease and grazers and predators to increase from high intertidal to subtidal, probably driven by decreasing physical stress. The gastropod Tegula patagonica, the sea urchins Arbacia dufresnii and Pseudechinus magellanicus and the invasive algae Undaria pinnatifida were the most abundant species in 1 m–10 m levels. Based on previous work performed in the region, we hypothesize that the differences registered between intertidal and subtidal levels could be explained in part by an increase in physical stress at the intertidal, with low predation pressure that promotes positive interactions, while in the subtidal the increase in consumers and decrease of physical stress could lead to associational defences. Our results could be useful as baseline data to develop a sustainable network for long-term monitoring of benthic community changes due to anthropogenic activities.

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Assessment of Jessica oil spill impacts on intertidal invertebrate communities

Cited by 24 publications

References 12 publications

Optimizing Large-Scale Biodiversity Sampling Effort: Toward an Unbalanced Survey Design

Optimizing Large-Scale Biodiversity Sampling Effort: Toward an Unbalanced Survey Design

Predicting ecological resilience of marine benthic communities facing a high risk of oil spills

Benthic diversity and assemblage structure of a north Patagonian rocky shore: a monitoring legacy of the NaGISA project

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