Taxonomic and functional-trait metrics track recovery of demersal fish and shrimp communities following system collapse

• Published in: Frontiers in Marine Science
• Main Authors: Magnus Aune, Virginie Ramasco, Nadine Wells, Margaret Warren, Frédéric Cyr, Eric J. Pedersen, Mariano Koen-Alonso, Elena Eriksen, Raul Primicerio, Ulf Lindstrøm, Paul E. Renaud
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2024
• Subjects: regime shift; biodiversity; trophic level; Gadus morhua; species richness; functional dispersion; Science; Q; General. Including nature conservation; geographical distribution; QH1-199.5; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2024.1237573; https://doaj.org/article/e136bde7d8bd45fa87ba300da31bdde4

Monitoring programs that integrate both structural and functional ecosystem components play integral roles in ecosystem management and conservation planning. In the early 1990’s, the marine ecosystem of the waters surrounding Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) underwent a regime shift. Several demersal and pelagic fish stocks collapsed simultaneously, and this had significant ecological and socioeconomic consequences. As this regime shift impacted numerous commercial and non-commercial species, assessments based on individual species would be insufficient. We explored a variety of metrics that capture different facets of diversity across multiple species to provide a more robust ecosystem assessment. These were species richness, evenness, community-weighted means of maximum body length and trophic level (i.e., the mean maximum body size or trophic level of the species present in a community), and functional dispersion (FDis). The objectives of this study were 1) to assess trends in community structure of the NL demersal community during the post-collapse period (1995-2018), 2) explore how the various community-level metrics differ or are redundant, and 3) investigate how these metrics are associated with important covariates. Several metrics were redundant and displayed strongly positive, temporal trends being consistent with expectations for a recovery encompassing the entire demersal community. In particular, unweighted community-weighted means of body length and trophic level displayed nearly equal temporal patterns, showing increasing trends throughout the study period which were most prominent in the northern study area and within a limited depth range at the upper shelf break. Corresponding biomass-weighted metrics were also correlated with each other but only showed similar increasing tendencies after the first decade. In contrast, species richness did not show any temporal increase. Evenness and biomass-weighted FDis showed similar temporal patterns, decreasing during the first decade followed by strong ...