Data from: macrofaunal diversity patterns in coastal marine sediments: re-examining common metrics and methods ...

• Main Authors: Clinton, Mary, Snelgrove, Paul, Bates, Amanda
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2024
• Subjects: Biodiversity; power analysis; Functional groups; benthic infauna; Coastal ecology; Arctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10767379; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10767379

Complex biodiversity patterns arise in marine systems due to overlapping ecological processes, including organism interactions, resource distribution, and environmental conditions. Despite the importance of documenting these patterns, describing diversity in natural ecosystems remains challenging. Here, we investigate three nearshore sub-Arctic sites to describe benthic macroinfaunal taxa and biological traits, with the ultimate aim of determining whether common diversity metrics and typical sampling efforts adequately capture community composition in these systems. First, we assess how diversity relates to sediment depth, and examine relationships among commonly used taxonomic and functional diversity indices. Second, using a power analysis, we explore how sampling effort influences the interpretation of diversity patterns in coastal systems. We report significant variation in community composition among sites, even across small spatial scales of kilometers, and find that taxonomically diverse communities ... : Funding provided by: Ocean Frontier InstituteCrossref Funder Registry ID: https://ror.org/048py7387Award Number: Funding provided by: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research CouncilCrossref Funder Registry ID: https://ror.org/01h531d29Award Number: ...