Marine epibenthic functional diversity on Flemish Cap (north‐west Atlantic)—Identifying trait responses to the environment and mapping ecosystem functions. Issue 4 (29th January 2020) - Murillo, Francisco Javier
Abstract: Aim: To characterize the functional diversity and selected ecological functions of marine epibenthic invertebrate communities at the ecosystem scale and to evaluate the relative contributions of environmental filtering, including bottom‐contact fishing, and competitive interactions to benthic community assembly. Location: Flemish Cap, an ecosystem production unit and fishing bank in the high seas of the north‐west Atlantic Ocean. Methods: Through the use of Hierarchical Modelling of Species Communities (HMSC), we have explored seven community response traits to the environment applied to 105 epibenthic species and evaluated the influence of such traits on the community assembly processes. Assumed bioturbation, nutrient cycling and habitat provision functions, linked to individual or a combination of biological traits, were mapped using random forest modelling. Results: Functional richness within benthic communities reached an asymptote for trawl sets with roughly more than 30 species. Assemblages on top of the Flemish Cap (<500 m depth) were characterized by higher biomass of small‐ and medium‐sized species with short life spans, whereas large species with longer life spans and broadcast spawners were dominant in the deeper assemblages (500–1, 500 m depth). The amount of variation explained by the species' responses to the covariates mediated by the traits was relatively high (25%) indicating their relevance to community assembly. Community‐weighted mean trait values changed with depth and physical oceanographic variables, indicating that environmental filtering was occurring. Interspecific interactions, as inferred from the random effect at the sample level, accounted for 16.3% of the variance in the model, while fishing effort explained only 5.2% of the variance but conferred strong negative impacts for most species. Main conclusions: Our results suggest that while bottom‐contact fishing impacts have an effect on functional diversity, changes to the physical oceanography of the system are likely to have more profound impacts. The maps of benthic functioning can aid assessments of ecosystem impacts of fishing.