Disentangling the effect of space, time, and environmental and anthropogenic drivers on coastal macrobenthic β diversity in contrasting habitats over 15 years

• Published in: Science of The Total Environment
• Main Authors: Toumi, Chirine, Gauthier, Olivier, Grall, Jacques, Thiébaut, Éric, Boyé, Aurélien
• Other Authors: Laboratoire des Sciences de l'Environnement Marin (LEMAR) (LEMAR), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER)-Université de Brest (UBO)-Institut Universitaire Européen de la Mer (IUEM), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université de Brest (UBO)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université de Brest (UBO)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Station biologique de Roscoff = Roscoff Marine Station (SBR), Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Unité Dynamiques des Écosystèmes Côtiers (DYNECO), Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2024
• Subjects: [SDE]Environmental Sciences; North East Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hal.univ-brest.fr/hal-04655346; https://hal.univ-brest.fr/hal-04655346/document; https://hal.univ-brest.fr/hal-04655346/file/1-s2.0-S0048969724040671-main.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.173919

International audience Coastal zones are biodiversity hotspots and deliver essential ecosystem functions and services, yet they are exposed to multiple and interacting anthropogenic and environmental constraints. The individual and cumulative effects of these constraints on benthic communities, a key component of coastal ecosystems, and their variability across space and time, remains to be thoroughly quantified to guide conservation actions. Here, we explored how the presence of biogenic habitats influences the response of benthic communities to natural and anthropogenic constraints. We investigated this effect in both intertidal and subtidal habitats exposed to different pressures. We used data collected in the North-East Atlantic over 15 years (2005-2019) as part of the REBENT monitoring program, covering 38 sites of bare sediments, intertidal seagrass beds and maerl beds. We collected a range of environmental variables and proxies of anthropogenic pressures and used variation and hierarchical partitioning with redundancy analyses to estimate their relative effect on macrobenthic communities. We used descriptors modeling spatial and temporal structures (dbMEMs) to explore the scale of their effects and potential missing predictors. The selected variables explained between 53 % and 64 % of macrobenthic beta diversity depending on habitat and depth. Fishing pressures, sedimentary and hydrodynamics variables stood out as the most important predictors across all habitats while proxies of anthropogenic pressures were overall more important in intertidal habitats. In the intertidal, presence of biogenic habitat strongly modulated the amount of explained variance and the identity of the selected variable. Across both tidal levels, analysis of models' residuals further indicated that biogenic habitats might mitigate the effect of extreme environmental events. Our study provides a hierarchy of the most important drivers of benthic communities across different habitats and tidal levels, emphasizing the prominence of ...