Variation in benthic long-term data of transitional waters: Is interpretation more than speculation?

ABSTRACT: Biological long-term data series in marine habitats are often used to identify anthropogenic impacts on the environment or climate induced regime shifts. However, particularly in transitional waters, environmental properties like water mass dynamics, salinity variability and the occurrence of oxygen minima not necessarily caused by either human activities or climate change can attenuate or mask apparent signals. At first glance it very often seems impossible to interpret the strong fluctuations of e.g. abundances or species richness, since abiotic variables like salinity and oxygen content vary simultaneously as well as in apparently erratic ways. The long-term development of major macrozoobenthic parameters (abundance, biomass, species numbers) and derivative macrozoobenthic indices (Shan

SUBMITTER: Zettler ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5396916 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature