Remote underwater video reveals higher fish diversity and abundance in seagrass meadows, and habitat differences in trophic interactions.

ABSTRACT: Seagrass meadows play a key ecological role as nursery and feeding grounds for multiple fish species. Underwater Visual Census (UVC) has been historically used as the non-extractive method to characterize seagrass fish communities, however, less intrusive methodologies such as Remote Underwater Video (RUV) are gaining interest and could be particularly useful for seagrass habitats, where juvenile fish camouflage among the vegetation and could easily hide or flee from divers. Here we compared the performance of UVC and RUV methodologies in assessing the fish communities of two seagrass meadows with low and high canopy density. We found that RUV detected more species and fish individuals than UVC, particularly on the habitat with higher seagrass density, which sheltered more juveniles, espec

SUBMITTER: Zarco-Perello S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6488625 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature