Exploring the relationships between abiotic variables and benthic community structure in a polluted estuarine system
Assessed was the effect of a man-induced interference in an estuarine system by monitoring a set of hydrographic and sedimentary variables together with a faunal survey of intertidal mudflats. A reference site was established in a nearby unpolluted estuary. A principal components analysis (PCA) redu...
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Published in | Water research (Oxford) Vol. 32; no. 12; pp. 3799 - 3807 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Oxford
Elsevier Ltd
1998
Elsevier Science |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Assessed was the effect of a man-induced interference in an estuarine system by monitoring a set of hydrographic and sedimentary variables together with a faunal survey of intertidal mudflats. A reference site was established in a nearby unpolluted estuary. A principal components analysis (PCA) reduced the original environmental data to a few more manageable factors. PCA factor I, defined by changes in salinity at the surface of the water column and dissolved oxygen at the bottom, explained 40% of the total variance. Pair-wise correlations between different structural metrics and PCA factor I explained up to 70% of the variability observed in the community metrics. Macrobenthic communities were simpler (with minor values of abundance, diversity, evenness and a much lower value of biomass) where dissolved oxygen at the bottom of the water column was minimum. An afaunal stage developed along intertidal mudflats where anoxic conditions prevailed. There was a large “weight-of-evidence” that a depletion of dissolved oxygen was causing a severe stress to the estuarine biota. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0043-1354 1879-2448 |
DOI: | 10.1016/S0043-1354(98)00167-5 |