Spatial and temporal variability of benthic community structure in high arctic lagoons ...
Shallow (<5 m) coastal lagoons of the Alaskan Arctic are highly dynamic environments that sustain benthic invertebrate communities critical to local food webs and sediment nutrient cycling. Invertebrate communities must cope with a variety of disturbances, including winter bottom-fast ice, spring...
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| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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The University of Texas at Austin
2023
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/48588 https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/121762 |
| Summary: | Shallow (<5 m) coastal lagoons of the Alaskan Arctic are highly dynamic environments that sustain benthic invertebrate communities critical to local food webs and sediment nutrient cycling. Invertebrate communities must cope with a variety of disturbances, including winter bottom-fast ice, spring freshwater inputs, and summer turbidity. From 2018 to 2022, quantitative benthic sampling during April, June, and August in four lagoons along 500 km of Alaskan Arctic coast have revealed depth-dependent spatial and temporal variations in benthic community structure. Multivariate analyses showed spatial variability was relegated to the deeper (> 2 m) stations of every lagoon, and all four lagoons possessed distinct assemblages (ANOSIM: R = 0.6955, p = 0.001) that were mostly driven by different polychaete species. Distance-based redundancy analysis (adjusted r² = 0.19) showed that these differences were mostly attributed to the static variables of longitude, depth, and sediment grain size. We observed an ... |
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