After decades of strict pollution control and municipal sewage treatment, the water quality of the Tanshui River increased significantly after pollution mitigation as indicated by the River Pollution Index (RPI). The pollution level of the estuarine region decreased from severe pollution to mostly moderately impaired. The most polluted waters are presently restricted to a flow track length betw...

The past decade has seen growing appreciation of the role of regional influences in determining the structure of local communities. An emerging view among ecologists is that local community composition is controlled by acting of nested filters which select species with suitable traits for prevailing conditions, thus leading communities regulated by local environmental factors and regional, main...

benthic organisms have been studied in past to assess the health of an aquatic ecosystem. moreover, being sedentary forms they have been used as indicator organisms. in the present study, an attempt has been made to study the distribution and assemblage of major macrobenthic forms occurring in ponnani estuary. a total of 23 genera of benthic invertebrate fauna belonging to 6 groups viz., polych...

Bottom trawling has widespread impacts on benthic communities and habitats. It is argued that the impact of chronic bottom trawling on benthic infauna depends on the natural disturbance levels to which benthic communities are adapted. We analysed biomass, production and size structure of two communities from a muddy and a sandy habitat, in relation to quantified gradients of trawling disturbanc...

Excessive input of nitrogen to estuaries and coastal waters leads to eutrophication; the resulting organic matter over-enrichment of sediments and seasonal hypoxia of bottom water have significant deleterious effects on benthic community biodiversity, abundance, and biomass. Our goal was to better understand how these losses carry through to impairment of key ecosystem functions of benthic comm...

Changes to benthic infauna caused by scallop dredging at a site in Port Phillip Bay, southeastern Australia, were examined experimentally using a BACl (before, after, control, impact) design. The experimental dredging was undertaken by commercial fishermen and was typical of normal commercial operations in its spatial extent, intensity and duration Changes to benthic community structure followi...

Environmental conditions fostering marine communities around Antarctica differ fundamentally from those in the rest of the world's oceans, particularly in terms of pronounced climatic fluctuations and extreme cold. Here, we argue that the rarity of pelagic larval stages in Antarctic marine benthic invertebrate species is a consequence of evolutionary temperature adaptation and that this has gre...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are designed to reduce threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning from anthropogenic activities. Assessment of MPAs effectiveness requires synchronous sampling of protected and non-protected areas at multiple spatial and temporal scales. We used an autonomous underwater vehicle to map benthic communities in replicate 'no-take' and 'general-use' (fishing allo...