Functional Diversity and Traits Assembly Patterns of Benthic Macrofaunal Communities in the Southern North Sea - Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach in Earth System Science - page 169

Functional Diversity and Traits Assembly
Patterns of Benthic Macrofaunal
Communities in the Southern North Sea

Mehdi Ghodrati Shojaei, Lars Gutow, Jennifer Dannheim, Hendrik
Pehlke and Thomas Brey

Abstract The study of ecosystem functioning fluxes of energy and material

through biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem

— the fl

is becoming increasingly
important in benthic ecological research. We investigated the functional structure of
macrozoobenthic communities at four long-term sampling sites in the southern
North Sea using biological traits assigned to life history, morphological and
behavioural characteristics. The

—

species of the macrofaunal assemblages
at the sampling sites was characterized by small to medium body size, infaunal
burrowing life style, deposit feeding habit, omnivory diet type, short to medium life
span, gonochoristic sexual differentiation, <2 years age at maturity, high fecundity,
and planktotrophic development mode. Functional diversity differed signi

“ typical ”

cantly
among the four sites. As part of the present study, trait information for >330
macrofaunal taxa have been compiled in a comprehensive database.

Keywords Functional diversity Biological traits Macrozoobenthos North sea

1 Introduction

Distribution, abundance and community composition of the North Sea macrozoo-
benthos are strongly in uenced by a variety of physical, chemical and biological

factors (Bremner et al. 2006 ; Franke and Gutow 2004 ;Kr

fl

ncke et al. 2004 ).
Temperature, water depth, food supply and sediment type have been shown to have
critical,

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though sometimes variable effects on macrofaunal distribution