Climatic fluctuations may significantly alter the taxonomic and biochemical composition of phytoplankton blooms and subsequently phytodetritus, the food source for the majority of deep-sea communities. To examine the response of abyssal benthic communities to different food resources we simulated a food sedimentation event containing diatoms and coccolithophorids at Station M in the NE Pacific....

Analyzing functional species' characteristics (species traits) that represent physiological, life history and morphological characteristics of species help understanding the impacts of various stressors on aquatic communities at field conditions. This research aimed to study the combined effects of pesticides and other environmental factors (temperature, dissolved oxygen, dissolved organic carb...

abstract information about the spatial patterns of soil biodiversity is limited though required, e.g. for understanding effects of biodiversity on ecosystem processes. this study was conducted to determine whether soil macrofauna biodiversity parameters display spatial patterns in the riparian forest landscape of karkhe. soil macrofauna were sampled using 200 sampling point along parallel trans...

Sediment properties, microphytobenthos biomass (chlorophyll a and phaeopigments), and the structure of the benthic communities of the three main lagoons (Mirim, Imaruí and Santo Antonio) of the Laguna Estuarine System, South Brazil, were analyzed during summer and winter. Microphytobenthos biomass did not differ significantly among the lagoons, but showed higher values in the summer. The macrof...

Diverse faunal groups inhabit deep-sea sediments over much of Earth's surface, but our understanding of how interannual-scale climate variation alters sediment community components and biogeochemical processes remains limited. The vast majority of deep-sea communities depend on a particulate organic carbon food supply that sinks from photosynthetically active surface waters. Variations in food ...

Sea-level rise induced by climate change may have significant impacts on the ecosystem functions and ecosystem services provided by intertidal sediment ecosystems. Accelerated sea-level rise is expected to lead to steeper beach slopes, coarser particle sizes and increased wave exposure, with consequent impacts on intertidal ecosystems. We examined the relationships between abundance, biomass, a...

This paper reviews the abundance and species richness, and factors that cause these parameters to vary, of mesofauna and macrofauna in an upland grassland soil studied intensively under the NERC Soil Biodiversity Programme. The concept that competitive exclusion does not act within soil communities is reviewed in light of these findings, which are placed in the context of the wider literature r...

The bottom water in the 4300 m deep Lower St. Lawrence Estuary (LSLE) is persistently hypoxic in contrast to the normoxic bottom waters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (GSL). We photographed the seabed at 11 stations in the Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence (EGSL) during the summers 2006 and 2007 and analysed the images to identify bioturbation traces (lebensspuren) and benthic macrofauna. The objec...

The polychaete Sabellaria alveolata (Linnaeus, 1767) is an important ecosystem engineer building reef structures which add to the topographic complexity in colonized areas. In Europe, the most extensive reef formation is located in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel (France). Since 2006, Sabellaria bio-constructions have developed on hard substrates along the west coast of the Cotentin Peninsula betw...

To assess the role of macrofauna-mediated sediment changes on nematode community recovery, we examined the temporal development of macrobenthos, nematode communities and sediment properties following hypoxia in 16 m2 replicated plots over a 6 mo period. Hypoxia drastically changed nematode community composition (i.e. reduced diversity and abundances of all dominant nematodes, except Odontophora...