Ron J. Etter

TL;DR: A conceptual model of how interdependent environmental factors shape regional-scale variation in local diversity in the deep sea is presented, showing how environmental gradients may form geographic patterns of diversity by influencing local processes such as predation, resource partitioning, competitive exclusion, and facilitation that determine species coexistence.

TL;DR: The first global-scale analysis of standing stock (abundance and biomass) for 4 major size classes of deep-sea biota: bacteria, meta- zoan meiofauna, macrofauna and megafauna shows a dramatic decrease in total community standing stock and the ascendancy of smaller organisms with depth.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that sediment diversity is a significant positive function of sediment particle size diversity and the relationship seems to be scale-invariant, accounting for a similar proportion of the variance at inter-regional, regional and local scales.

TL;DR: Rex and Etter as mentioned in this paper presented the first synthesis of patterns and causes of biodiversity in organisms that dwell in the vast sediment ecosystem that blankets the ocean floor and provided the most comprehensive analysis to date of geographic variation in benthic animal abundance and biomass.

TL;DR: The strong effect of the regional species pool implies that patterns of local diversity in temperate, tropical, and high-latitude marine benthic communities are influenced by processes operating on larger spatiotemporal scales than previously thought.