Human Trampling Effect on Benthic Fauna of Sandy Beaches With Different Intensities of Use in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract

About 75% of the world's shoreline is composed of beach environments. Among them, the sandy beach is a familiar environment and used for tourism and recreation. The organisms that live in these environments, as polychaetes, crustaceans and mollusks, are almost unknown by people because they live buried. Thus, many time people could cause damage to these organisms without their own knowledge. Trampling is one of the human-induced impacts to those organisms, destroying their bodies or even dispelling them. Focused on this behavior, this research aims to simulate trampling on two sandy beaches and to observe a real scenario of recreation on weekends and during the week during summer and winter seasons in the Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil. This study verified the changes occurring mainly in the faunal density of these two beaches with different intensities of use, in the predefined situations. Samples were collected during four months, on the second half of year, using simulated treatments and in another two months simple observation of the behavior of tourists was also performed. The simulated treatments did not cause significant changes in any collection except two. One of them was possibly a sampling artifact, which may be due to a low level of impact. The samples on the winter months also did not show significant changes, but the summer samples showed a large decrease in density of organisms during the weekend compared to during the week, probably related to the high intensity of human activity. As this study aimed to verify changes or impacts in organisms at up to 20 cm of depth, we concluded that only high impact activities could affect drastically the faunal density, as observed during the summer season at weekends on the study.

Structure of meiofaunal communities in an urban tropical sandy beach in Pernambuco, Brazil

“…Infralittoral: dry (December) Theristus Neochromadora Other constructions observed during sampling trips suggests that anthropogenic factors may have contributed to the absence of a meiofaunal community in the upper mesolittoral zone of the study area. As has been reported in previous studies, vehicle movements and intense trampling, especially in the upper littoral and supralittoral zones, interferes with species life cycles and may even result in species being lost from the community (dos Santos-Reis andRizzo 2019, Santos et al 2021).…”

Characterization of Intertidal Macrofaunal Communities of Two Sandy Beaches under Different Anthropogenic Pressures

“…The ecological status of submerged sandy beaches can be assessed by analyzing the composition and abundance of benthic macrofauna as macrofauna living in the intertidal zone can be particularly vulnerable to beach activities and disturbances [37][38][39][40]. Even if the data on specific impacts influencing macrofauna are limited, the number of studies regarding the response of macrofaunal communities and populations towards physical disturbances has increased in recent decades [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49].…”

“…Some of the studies are based on single indicator species, while others are focused on the overall macrofaunal community. Especially the organisms living buried in the sand, such as polychaetes, molluscs and crustaceans that are directly damaged by beach activities [39]. However, different taxa have different levels of sensitivity to disturbance, with certain species having been reported to be more vulnerable than others [42].…”