Can benthic community structure be used to predict the process of bioturbation in real ecosystems?

Exploring the Relationship between Macrofaunal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in the Deep Sea

“…Mediterranean benthic organisms have been reported to have a generally smaller size than those inhabiting the Atlantic Ocean (Sardà et al, 2004;Tecchio et al, 2011;Pape et al, 2013), and significantly lower macrobenthic biomass values have been described in the Mediterranean basin compared with the Atlantic sector (Tselepides et al, 2000;Coll et al, 2010;Baldrighi et al, 2014). The bioturbation activity of organisms can affect both the abiotic and biotic components of a system (Quéiros et al, 2015), and is one of the functional traits of benthic organisms that may sustain mutualistic interactions on the basis of BEF relationships (Loreau, 2008). On the large spatial scale, bioturbation was positively and linearly correlated with ecosystem efficiency.…”

“…Functional diversity was assessed using 4 indices ( Table 1): trophic diversity ( −1 ), expected number of deposit feeders (EDF (30) ), expected number of predator species (EPR (20) ), and bioturbation potential (BP) (Baldrighi and Manini, 2015;Quéiros et al, 2015). The trophic diversity index was included, because affinity to a given trophic group entails a discrete selection of food sources, hence a different ecological role (Dunne et al, 2002), and feeding mechanisms are held to be central processes structuring marine ecosystems and providing a strong link between species and ecosystem functions (Pearson and Rosenberg, 1987).…”

“…Indeed, we considered the macrofaunal bioturbation activity to be an important functional trait. In the present work, we estimated the macrofaunal bioturbation potential according to the formula reported in Quéiros et al (2015):…”

“…Since functional diversity provides a direct mechanistic link between diversity and ecosystem functioning, a growing amount of research is being devoted to assessing the effect of functional-rather than taxon-diversity on ecosystem functioning (Petchey et al, 2004;Reiss et al, 2009). Numerous independent variables of functional traits, including feeding guilds, reproduction strategy, bioturbation mode and/or body shape (e.g., Ieno et al, 2006;Carvalho et al, 2013;Pape et al, 2013;Piot et al, 2014;Quéiros et al, 2015), and biological traits analysis (e.g., Bremner et al, 2003;Bolam and Eggleton, 2014) have been applied to express functional diversity. Nevertheless, there is currently no universally accepted methodology for selecting the most appropriate traits for a given study (Bolam, 2013), and quite often the selection is heavily affected by the limited biological information that is available for benthic invertebrate taxa (Bremner, 2008).…”

Temporal variability in total, micro- and nano-phytoplankton primary production at a coastal site in the Western English Channel

“…In our study, increased SST and decreased wind speeds were associated with later blooms and mixed layer depth was unrelated to either the timing of the blooms or the annual carbon fixation. Later timing of the spring bloom coupled with increases in precipitation forced by changes in the jet stream (Francis and Vavrus, 2012;Rahmstorf and Coumou, 2011) would lead to spring blooms that continue into the summer in these coastal waters; a situation which occurred in both 2011 (Queirós et al, 2015) and 2012 (Zhang et al, 2015) at station L4. During years with high summer precipitation, there was an increase in both micro-and total primary production (e.g.…”