Biological traits of marine benthic invertebrates in Northwest Europe

Abstract

Biological traits analysis (BTA) provides insight into causes and consequences of biodiversity change that cannot be achieved using traditional taxonomic approaches. However, acquiring information on biological traits (i.e., the behavioural, morphological, and reproductive characteristics of taxa) can be extremely time-consuming, especially for large community datasets, thus hindering the successful application of BTA. Here, we present information on ten key biological traits for over a thousand marine benthic invertebrate taxa surveyed in Northwest Europe (mainly the UK shelf). Scores of 0 to 3 are provided to indicate our confidence that taxa exhibit each possible mode of trait expression. The information was acquired over a decade through an extensive appraisal of relevant sources, including peer-reviewed papers, books, online material and, where necessary, professional judgement. These data may be inspected, used, and augmented by fellow researchers, thus assisting in the wider application of BTA in marine benthic ecology.

Mapping marine benthic biological traits to facilitate future sustainable development

“…Second, 143 taxon entries considered too high a taxonomic level for meaningful trait description (e.g., “animalia,” “mollusca,” entries at the phylum level) were removed. Of the remaining 3998 taxa, 1000 were not identified within Cefas' biological traits repository (Clare et al, 2022a), principally since many taxa within OneBenthic are at the species level, while the trait information of Clare et al (2022a) is based on the genus level or above. This issue was addressed by assigning, where possible, taxa to traits based on the traits of the most closely related taxa, mostly using the existing traits information for genera within the same family (de Juan et al, 2022).…”

“…Trait information was obtained from Cefas' macrofaunal trait data repository (Clare et al, 2022a, 2022b) collected over many years from a variety of sources; principally from published journal papers and books, and websites of various scientific institutions (e.g., http://marlin.ac.uk/biotic/). While it was possible to access reliable information for many taxa from these sources regarding certain traits (e.g., larval development location), published information describing other traits (e.g., longevity) was not available for large proportions of the taxa.…”

“…Meanwhile, as the traits that govern a taxon's functional potential will depend on the function in question (de Juan et al, 2022;Martins & Barros, 2022), we consider the five effects traits used here to relate varyingly to a suite of functions. Each trait was subdivided into multiple "categories" chosen to encompass the range of possible attributes of all the taxa (Clare et al, 2022a; Table 1). Sediment position Surface 0-5 cm 5-10 cm >10 cm Typical living position in the sediment profile.…”

“…Trait information was obtained from Cefas' macrofaunal trait data repository (Clare et al, 2022a(Clare et al, , 2022b collected over many years from a variety of sources; principally from published journal papers and books, and websites of various scientific institutions (e.g., http://marlin. ac.uk/biotic/).…”

Functional trait responses to different anthropogenic pressures

“…Each taxon was assigned to the trait categories using a 'fuzzy coding' approach (Chevene et al, 1994), using the Cefas traits information (Clare et al, 2022). The trait categories were given an affinity score between 0 and 3, with 0 indicating no affinity and 3 indicating a high affinity of a species to a trait category.…”