Benthic megafauna habitats, community structure and environmental drivers at Rio Grande Rise (SW Atlantic)

Corrêa, Paulo Vinicius Ferraz; Jovane, Luigi; Murton, Bramley J.; Sumida, Paulo Yukio Gomes

doi:10.1016/j.dsr.2022.103811

Cited by 8 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 93 publications

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“…Ophiuroidea and Gastropoda are found throughout the Atlantic and Southern Ocean e.g., [58,[137][138][139][140][141] but have rarely been found to dominate comparable macrofaunal community compositions e.g., [28,78]. Our results may support the hypothesis that benthic fauna assemblages are distributed patchily e.g., [142,143], with Ophiuroidea and Gastropoda only dominant within a single region and depth group that consists of only one station. Furthermore, this single station cannot be seen as representative for the entire depth region.…”

Section: Patterns In Community Compositionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Pan-Atlantic Comparison of Deep-Sea Macro- and Megabenthos

et al. 2023

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Deep-sea benthic fauna is vital for a well-functioning marine ecosystem but is increasingly under threat from a changing environment. To monitor and conserve this fauna, an understanding of their large-scale spatial and bathymetric distribution and their environmental drivers is necessary. In this study, we conduct a multivariate analysis on abundance benthic fauna data collected at the phylum and multitaxon levels using an epibenthic sledge (EBS) across the Atlantic, and identify the environmental factors that affect such data. Our findings show a decrease in abundance with depth in most of the Atlantic but find relatively heterogeneous abundances with depth within the Southern Ocean. Principal component analyses indicate differences in environmental conditions south of the Antarctic Polar Front (~52° S), outlining contrasts in the quantities of macronutrients and physical factors. Despite this, community composition seemed markedly similar throughout the Atlantic with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current seemingly not affecting benthic community composition for higher taxonomic levels. Those differences that did occur were largely caused by benthic chlorophyll, benthic iron, and surface silicate through a Bio-ENV. Overall, we argue that further large-scale spatial and bathymetric distribution studies are important amid environmental changes that are driving shifts in benthic community abundance and composition.

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Section: Patterns In Community Compositionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Pan-Atlantic Comparison of Deep-Sea Macro- and Megabenthos

et al. 2023

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“…The classification of the seafloor would probably serve as the physical and geological elements to exert a significant impact on the benthic habitats and the biodiversity of organisms inhabiting the underwater environments. Correâ et al (2022) conducted an exploration of the plateau and rifts in the Rio Grande Rise (RGR) area with the HyBIS robot and analyzed the description of the structuring factors regarding seafloor topography and habitat types, which revealed highly heterogeneous and rapidly changing habitats with differences in geomorphology, slope, and substrate textures. Urra et al (2021) characterized the geomorphologic diversity, habitats, and associated biodiversity in the Gazul MV mud volcanoes with underwater imaging and multibeam bathymetry techniques, identifying habitats harboring a characteristic faunal assemblage and highlighting the slope and water depth as the main factors explaining the distribution of the assemblages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward the development of smart capabilities for understanding seafloor stretching morphology and biogeographic patterns via DenseNet from high-resolution multibeam bathymetric surveys for underwater vehicles

Nian,

Liu,

et al. 2023

Front. Mar. Sci.

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The increasing use of underwater vehicles facilitates deep-sea exploration at a wide range of depths and spatial scales. In this paper, we make an initial attempt to develop online computing strategies to identify seafloor categories and predict biogeographic patterns with a deep learning-based architecture, DenseNet, integrated with joint morphological cues, with the expectation of potentially developing its embedded smart capacities. We utilized high-resolution multibeam bathymetric measurements derived from MBES and denoted a collection of joint morphological cues to help with semantic mapping and localization. We systematically strengthened dominant feature propagation and promoted feature reuse via DenseNet by applying the channel attention module and spatial pyramid pooling. From our experiment results, the seafloor classification accuracy reached up to 89.87%, 82.01%, and 73.52% on average in terms of PA, MPA, and MIoU metrics, achieving comparable performances with the state-of-the-art deep learning frameworks. We made a preliminary study on potential biogeographic distribution statistics, which allowed us to delicately distinguish the functionality of probable submarine benthic habitats. This study demonstrates the premise of using underwater vehicles through unbiased means or pre-programmed path planning to quantify and estimate seafloor categories and the exhibited fine-scale biogeographic patterns.

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“…The most likely target area for FeMn crusts exploration consist of FeMn pavements at the plateau along the CSL (Corrêa et al, 2022;Sergipe et al, 2023).…”

Section: Geological Setting Of Rgrmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…ROV images in the WRGR plateau reveal that the FeMn crust pavements occur on calcarenite substrate, with scattered thin sediment cover, but also FeMn crust debris, irregular FeMn crusts, and FeMn coated volcanic rock outcrops occur along the rift walls and occasional FeMn coated boulders and cobbles (Corrêa et al, 2022).…”

Section: Geological Setting Of Rgrmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The RGR is the first location in the South Atlantic Ocean to gain visibility regarding deep-sea Fe-Mn-oxide mineral deposits. Previous ROV dives showed a broad occurrence of FeMn crusts and biodiversity on the main plateau (Corrêa et al, 2022), and the FeMn crusts from the RGR summit area were the first to undergo detailed geochemical and microbiological studies Bergo et al, 2021;Sousa et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Geochemistry and formation of ferromanganese crusts and associated mineral deposits in the Rio Grande Rise, Southwest Atlantic Ocean

Benites

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Benthic megafauna habitats, community structure and environmental drivers at Rio Grande Rise (SW Atlantic)

Cited by 8 publications

References 93 publications

Pan-Atlantic Comparison of Deep-Sea Macro- and Megabenthos

Pan-Atlantic Comparison of Deep-Sea Macro- and Megabenthos

Toward the development of smart capabilities for understanding seafloor stretching morphology and biogeographic patterns via DenseNet from high-resolution multibeam bathymetric surveys for underwater vehicles

Geochemistry and formation of ferromanganese crusts and associated mineral deposits in the Rio Grande Rise, Southwest Atlantic Ocean

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