Spatial and Temporal Variation in Deep-Sea Meiofauna at the LTER Observatory HAUSGARTEN in the Fram Strait (Arctic Ocean)

• Published in: Diversity
• Main Authors: Thomas Soltwedel, Katarzyna Grzelak, Christiane Hasemann
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020
• Subjects: meiofauna; deep-sea; temporal; spatial; time-series; Long-Term Ecological Research; Biology (General); QH301-705.5; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Fram Strait
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/d12070279; https://doaj.org/article/452a6471c29b47989750d6a8bc290047

Time-series studies at the LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) observatory HAUSGARTEN have yielded the world’s longest time-series on deep-sea meiofauna and thus provide a decent basis to investigate the variability in deep-sea meiobenthic communities at different spatial and temporal scales. The main objective of the present study was to investigate whether the sediment-dwelling meiofauna (size range: 32–1000 µm) is controlled by small-scale local environmental conditions, rather than large-scale differences between water depths. Univariate and multivariate statistical analyses, including distance-based linear models (DistLM) and redundancy analysis (dbRDA), revealed that due to their small size, meiofauna tend to mainly respond to micro-scale (centimeter) variations in environmental conditions in surface and subsurface sediment layers. Inter-annual temporal patterns among metazoan meiofauna at higher taxon levels revealed only a weak effect of time, and merely on the rare meiofauna taxa (<2% of the total meiofauna community) at HAUSGARTEN.