Assessing the suitability of a range of benthic indices in the evaluation of environmental impact of fin and shellfish aquaculture located in sites across Europe

TLDR: The use of several benthic indicators, in assessing farm impacts, together with the investigation of dynamics of the studied location, water depth, years of farm activity, and total annual production, must be included when interpreting the response ofbenthic communities to organic enrichment from aquaculture.

About: This article is published in Aquaculture.The article was published on 2009-08-16 and is currently open access. It has received 178 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Aquaculture & Benthic zone.

Figures

Table 3 Pearson's correlation coefficients and p-values between the studied variables, taking into ac

Fig. 6. a) ReDundancy Analysis (RDA) biplot of the relationships between themacrofaunal characteristics (full-line arrows) and the environmental parameters (dashed arrows). The arrows indicate the direction of increase for the variables studied. The angles between variables reflect their correlations (angles near 90° indicate no correlation, angles near 0° indicate high positive correlation and angles near 180° indicate high negative correlation). b) Partition of the variation of the macrobenthic characteristics (obtained by partial RDA) among three groups of explanatory variables: (H) hydrographical characteristics: average current speed,depth, anddistance to cages; (C) characteristics of farms: years of production and annual production in tons; and (S) sediment characteristics: Eh, percentage of silt, and total organic matter (TOM).

Table 1 Locations sampled in each country, including the number of sampling stations, the species far years of production, average current speed at 15 m water depth (except in Piran, which wa

Fig. 1. Position of the sampling locations across Europe.

Table 4 Multiple regression models taking into account data from all the subtidal sampled sites.

Fig. 3. Spatial variability of macrofaunal abundance across the studied transects. The direc N: North, E: East, W: West). At Bisceglie, Chioggia and Garrucha the macrofaunal biomass i

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Borja et al. this paper evaluated the suitability of a range of benthic indices in the evaluation of environmental impact of fin and shellfish aquaculture located in sites across Europe.