Seafloor biodiversity of Canada's three oceans: Patterns, hotspots and potential drivers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim We examined the relationships between bathymetry, latitude and energy and the diversity of marine benthic invertebrates across wide environmental ranges of Canada's three oceans. Location Canadian Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the intertidal zone to upper bathyal depths, encompassing 13 marine ecoregions. Methods We compiled 35 benthic datasets that encompass 3,337 taxa (70% identified to species and 21% to genus) from 13,172 samples spanning 6,117 sites. Partitioning the analyses by different gear types, ecoregions or sites, we used Hill numbers to examine spatial patterns in α‐diversity. We used resampling and extrapolation to standardized sampling effort and examined the effects of depth, latitude, chemical energy (export particulate organic carbon [POC] flux), thermal energy (bottom temperature) and seasonality of primary production on the benthic biodiversity. Results The Canadian Arctic harboured the highest benthic diversity (e.g. epifauna and common and dominant infauna species), whereas the lowest diversity was found in the Atlantic. The Puget Trough (Pacific), Beaufort Sea, Arctic Archipelago, Hudson Bay, Northern Labrador and Southern Grand Bank (Atlantic) were the “hotspots" of diversity among the ecoregions. The infauna and epifauna both exhibited hump‐shaped diversity–depth relationships, with peak diversity near shelf breaks; latitude (positively) predicted infaunal diversity, albeit weakly. Food supply, as inferred from primary production and depth, was more important than thermal energy in controlling diversity patterns. Limitations with respect to calculating POC flux in coastal (e.g. terrestrial runoff) and ice‐covered regions or biological interactions may explain the negative POC flux–infaunal diversity relationship. Main Conclusions We show previously unreported diversity hotspots in the Canadian Arctic and in other ecoregions. Our analyses reveal potential controlling mechanisms of large‐scale benthic biodiversity patterns in Canada's three oceans, which are inconsistent with the prevailing view of seafloor energy–diversity relationships. These results provide insightful information for conservation that can help to implement further MPA networks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".