Top-Down Regulation, Climate and Multi-Decadal Changes in Coastal Zoobenthos Communities in Two Baltic Sea Areas

Abstract

The structure of many marine ecosystems has changed substantially during recent decades, as a result of overexploitation, climate change and eutrophication. Despite of the apparent ecological and economical importance of coastal areas and communities, this aspect has received relatively little attention in coastal systems. Here we assess the temporal development of zoobenthos communities in two areas on the Swedish Baltic Sea coast during 30 years, and relate their development to changes in climate, eutrophication and top-down regulation from fish. Both communities show substantial structural changes, with a decrease in marine polychaetes and species sensitive to increased water temperatures. Concurrently, opportunistic species tolerant to environmental perturbation have increased in abundance. Species composition show a similar temporal development in both communities and significant changes in species composition occurred in both data sets in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The change in species composition was associated with large scale changes in climate (salinity and water temperature) and to the structure of the local fish community, whereas we found no effects of nutrient loading or ambient nutrient concentrations. Our results suggest that these coastal zoobenthos communities have gone through substantial structural changes over the last 30 years, resulting in communities of different species composition with potentially different ecological functions. We hence suggest that the temporal development of coastal zoobenthos communities should be assessed in light of prevailing climatic conditions considering the potential for top-down effects exerted by local fish communities.

Temporal and spatial changes of macrobenthos community in the regions frequently occurring black water aggregation in Lake Taihu

“…Moreover, Lake Taihu is kind of lakes for fish farming. The predation risk from fishes also influence the macrobenthos community 53 . Thus, more parameters need to be included in future investigations to better understand the biological-environmental relationships.…”

Four decades of functional community change reveals gradual trends and low interlinkage across trophic groups in a large marine ecosystem

“…To illustrate the pronounced, natural gradient in biodiversity, and environmental characteristics of the Baltic Sea from south to north (Griffiths et al, ; SuppInfo A: Table S1, Table S2), three coastal areas: Vendelsö (hereafter “Kattegat,” 57°13′N; 12°04′E), Kvädofjärden (hereafter “Baltic Proper” 58°01′N;16°46′E) and Forsmark (hereafter “Bothnian Sea,” 60°26′N; 18°09′E), with comparable long‐term data series were chosen for the analysis (Olsson et al, ). Although we hereafter refer to the common and larger‐scale geographical names for the areas (Kattegat, Baltic Proper and Bothnian Sea), the data are primarily representative for the coastal parts of the basins.…”

“…First, the focus on single trophic levels or specific organism groups restricts us from scaling up to encompass entire food webs and generalizing across ecosystems (Reiss, Birdle, Montoy, & Woodward, ; Thebault & Loreau, ). Only few studies have quantified temporal changes in both marine prey and consumer diversity (Katano, Doi, Eriksson, & Hillebrand, ), and fewer still in natural marine ecosystems (Englund, Rydberg, & Leonardsson, ; Nordström, Aarnio, Törnroos, & Bonsdorff, ; Olsson, Bergström, & Gårdmark, ). Second, adequately long time series, spanning several decades, are required to observe community and ecosystem change but are unfortunately often unavailable (Koslow & Couture, ).…”

“…It thereby provides an ideal model system for assessing long‐term trends in functional diversity and dynamics within organism and trophic groups such as fish and zoobenthos. Given the predator–prey relationship and that the groups respond to similar local environmental drivers (Olsson, Bergström, & Gårdmark, ; Olsson et al, ), we explore the hypothesis that the functional community developments of fish and zoobenthos are interlinked, or related to each other, with some time lag. Thus, we expect a relationship between the trends in diversity (species richness, trait richness, evenness and dispersion) and dynamics (trait turnover and multi‐trait composition) of the two groups.…”

The Influence of Stickleback on the Accumulation of Primary Production: a Comparison of Field and Experimental Data

“…The Baltic Sea is currently undergoing profound changes, including eutrophication, decreasing salinity, invasion of exotic species, overfishing, increased input of endocrine disrupters, heavy metals and pesticides and global warming. Changes in any of these factors could hamper the ability of the ecosystem to buffer growing stickleback populations (Eklof et al 2012;Olsson et al 2013;Rochet et al 2010). The growth of drifting algae mats during the last decades suggests that the grazer community in the Baltic Sea has not been able to track the increase in primary production.…”