Biofouling in the Southern Caspian Sea: recruitment and successional patterns in a low diversity region

Abstract

Biofouling assemblages have representative organisms from different taxa acting as a link in transferring energy in marine food webs and as complex structures that form new habitats for other species (Pinnegar et al. 2000, Relini et al. 2002, Krohling et al. 2006). From an economic perspective, the settlement and development of biofoulers on man-made structures lead to deterioration processes that demand high investments in maintenance and replacement activities (Yebra et al. 2004). Furthermore, biological descriptors (e.g., biodiversity) of fouling communities have been used as important tools in environmental impact assessment (Balaji and Rao 2004). Hence, numerous investigations on these assemblages have been conducted over the past decades around the world (e.g.,

Pathways to link biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: from monitoring to complex ecological interactions studies

“…Thus, surveys describing community compositions of those understudied areas are still of extreme importance and can help to gauge current and future developments in biodiversity research. Golinia et al (2019) presented the first record of biofouling communities in the Caspian Sea (Iran). In this region, the fouling pressure has been disregarded over many years, even though it represents a potential economic threat, which is predicted to increase due to shipping traffic in combination with global warming.…”