Spatial distribution of benthic flora and fauna of costal Placentia Bay, an ecologically and biologically significant area of the island of Newfoundland, Atlantic Canada ...

• Main Author: Mackin-McLaughlin, Julia
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 2023
• Subjects: Canada; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48336/ptx5-mr78; https://research.library.mun.ca/15955/

Coastal habitats are not only hotspots of biodiversity and ecosystem services, but are also hotspots for human development and exploitation, causing stress that threatens their sustainability. Overlap of coastal ecosystems with regions of high anthropogenic impacts requires developing a baseline that captures the present benthic composition with inclusion of the fundamental ecology of organisms interacting with their environment. This study establishes a baseline describing benthic organisms present along the western coast of Placentia Bay, a declared Ecologically and Biologically Significant Area (EBSA) of the Island of Newfoundland, Canada. The interactions of the four identified epifaunal assemblages and two dominant macrophyte species with their physical environment were modelled with a new modelling technique: Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM). Each developed model determined the inclusion of fine-scale (< 1 m) substrate % coverage as crucial to understanding the distribution of both ...