NONATObase: a database for Polychaeta (Annelida) from the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean

Abstract

Networks can greatly advance data sharing attitudes by providing organized and useful data sets on marine biodiversity in a friendly and shared scientific environment. NONATObase, the interactive database on polychaetes presented herein, will provide new macroecological and taxonomic insights of the Southwestern Atlantic region. The database was developed by the NONATO network, a team of South American researchers, who integrated available information on polychaetes from between 5°N and 80°S in the Atlantic Ocean and near the Antarctic. The guiding principle of the database is to keep free and open access to data based on partnerships. Its architecture consists of a relational database integrated in the MySQL and PHP framework. Its web application allows access to the data from three different directions: species (qualitative data), abundance (quantitative data) and data set (reference data). The database has built-in functionality, such as the filter of data on user-defined taxonomic levels, characteristics of site, sample, sampler, and mesh size used. Considering that there are still many taxonomic issues related to poorly known regional fauna, a scientific committee was created to work out consistent solutions to current misidentifications and equivocal taxonomy status of some species. Expertise from this committee will be incorporated by NONATObase continually. The use of quantitative data was possible by standardization of a sample unit. All data, maps of distribution and references from a data set or a specified query can be visualized and exported to a commonly used data format in statistical analysis or reference manager software. The NONATO network has initialized with NONATObase, a valuable resource for marine ecologists and taxonomists. The database is expected to grow in functionality as it comes in useful, particularly regarding the challenges of dealing with molecular genetic data and tools to assess the effects of global environment change.Database URL: http://nonatobase.ufsc.br/

Do Morphological Similarities and human-induced dispersal explain the non-native occurrence of Serpulidae (Annelida) in Southwest Atlantic? Taxonomic detailing is the key

“…Subsequent research greatly expanded our knowledge of the diversity and ecology of this group in the southern Atlantic (Nonato & Luna, 1970;ten Hove, 1975;Rullier & Amourex, 1979;Silva et al, 1980;Knight-Jones & Knight-Jones, 1991;Paiva, 1993;Santa-Isabel et al, 2000;Nogueira & ten Hove, 2000;Neves & Omena, 2003;Winston & Migotto, 2005;Assis et al, 2008Assis et al, , 2009Assis et al, , 2012Nogueira & Abbud, 2009;Skinner et al, 2012;Amaral et al, 2013;Schawn et al, 2016;Vieira et al, 2016). As a result of these efforts, the serpulid fauna in Brazil is known to number 43 species, of which only 14% are originally described for Brazil and the remaining 86% are considered exotic species (Amaral et al, 2013;Pagliosa et al, 2014).…”

“…Thirteen species of the genus Hydroides have been identified from along the Brazilian coast (Amaral et al, 2013;Pagliosa et al, 2014;Schawn et al, 2016;Ananias, 2017). Based on the results presented in Schwan et al (2016) and Amaral et al (2013), H. elegans and H. dirampha appear to be commonly found in Brazilian port zones.…”

“…Remarks: Twenty-three species of Protula are known from across the globe (ten Hove & Kupriyanova, 2009), of which only three have been recorded from the Brazilian coast: P. tubularia (Montagu, 1803), P. submedia Augener, 1906, andP. balboensis (Amaral et al, 2013;Pagliosa et al, 2014). Protula tubularia and P. balboensis are similar in having limbate thoracic chaetae and geniculate abdominal chaetae.…”

Phylogeography of the reef‐building polychaetes of the genus Phragmatopoma in the western Atlantic Region

“…Reefs of Phragmatopoma caudata Krøyer in M€ orch, 1863 are broadly distributed along the intertidal zone in the western Atlantic coastline, from Florida (USA) (34°N) to Santa Catarina (Brazil) (27°S), including many localities in the Caribbean (Kirtley, 1994). Although P. caudata reefs are known to exist at various locations along the Brazilian coast (Pagliosa et al, 2014), records in new localities continue to be reported. For instance, new reefs formed in Fortaleza (north Brazil) following the construction of a harbour (Fournier & Panizza pers.…”

Checklist of polychaetes (Annelida: Polychaeta) from a sandstone reef of Southeastern Brazil

“…For example, Phragmatopoma caudata (the most abundant), is a gregarious Sabellaridae ecologically relevant in the construction of biogenic reefs what contribute to increase diversity and protect coasts (Goldberg, 2013;Nunes et al, 2017). In Brazil, there are records of Phragmatopoma caudata along the coast, from the Piauí State in the Northeast (Gomes-Filho et al, 2017) to the Rio Grande do Sul State in the South of the country (Kirtley, 1994;Lana and Bremec, 1994;Pagliosa et al, 2014).…”