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Increased variability as a symptom of stress in marine communities
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Increased variability as a symptom of stress in marine communities

R.M. Warwick and K.R. Clarke
Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, Vol.172(1-2), pp.215-226
1993
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Abstract

An increase in variability between samples collected from impacted vs. control areas is described for four different types of marine communities: meiobcnthos subjected to organic enrichment, macrobenthos in the vicinity of the Ekofisk oil-field, reef-corals following the 1982-3 El Niño and fish on coral reefs which are subjected to mining. In each case there is a clear log-log relationship between the variance and the mean abundance for all species in a particular treatment group. The standard deviation for a given mean increases with increased perturbation in all cases, but is most marked for the meiobenthos and macrobenthos examples. Variability in species diversity (H') tends to increase with increasing levels of perturbation, but this increase is only significant for the macrobenthos. In all cases a pronounced increase in variability among replicate samples from perturbed treatments was revealed by multivariate analysis (non-metric Multi-Dimensional Scaling ordination). A comparative Index of Multivariate Dispersion (IMD) is suggested as a measure of this increased variability.

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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#14 Life Below Water

Source: InCites

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Citation topics
3 Agriculture, Environment & Ecology
3.2 Marine Biology
3.2.605 Benthic Biodiversity
Web Of Science research areas
Ecology
Marine & Freshwater Biology
ESI research areas
Plant & Animal Science
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