Table 1.
Station data showing the expedition, geographical position, depth, number of subsamples and sampling area at each station.
Fig 1.
Sampling area, mean sea-ice extent and visited stations.
Fig 2.
Cluster analysis (A) and non-metric multidimensional scaling plot (B) of all stations using the Bray-Curtis similarity index. Color indicates station group distinguished by depth. Orange–SHELF-group; red–UPPER SLOPE-group; green–MID-SLOPE-group; light-blue–LOWER SLOPE-group; dark-blue–PLAIN-group.
Fig 3.
Percentage diagrams of total abundance, biomass and number of species per taxonomic group.
Table 2.
Results of the ANOSIM analysis (abundance data).
MID-SLOPE-group is included in the UPPER SLOPE-group.
Table 3.
Dominant taxa of the station groups.
Depth range, number of stations in each station group, density of the dominant taxa and the mean dominance level with standard deviation are shown.
Table 4.
Diversity characteristics for different depth ranges.
Mean values of species number, abundance, biomass, Pielou evenness, Hurlbert rarefaction index for 100 individuals and Shannon-Wiener index with standard deviation are shown.
Fig 4.
Abundance (A) and biomass (B) at stations in relation to depth. Blue rhombuses–our data; black dots–data from [6,28]. Lineal trend lines with R2 and p values calculated for all samples are added.
Fig 5.
Number of species (A), Hurlbert rarefaction (B) and Shannon-Wiener index (C) at each station in relation to depth (logarithmic scale).
Table 5.
Results of the linear regression test for the abundance and biomass values related to depth.
Data from 1991 [28], 1993, 1997 [6] and 2012–2015 are shown.
Fig 6.
Results of canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) of the LOWER SLOPE and PLAIN station groups.
Ten most abundant taxa are shown. Axis 1 significance level– 0.281; axis 2 significance level– 0.231.
Table 6.
Spearman’s rank correlation between the community/species characteristics and the environmental/sediment parameters.
Correlated pairs with p<0.05 are shown.
Fig 7.
Species-individual accumulation curves with 95% confidence calculated separately for SHELF, UPPER SLOPE, MID-SLOPE, LOWER SLOPE and PLAIN station groups.
Fig 8.
Abundance (mean values with standard deviation) of the species revealed by the SIMPER-analysis of 1993 and 2015 samples taken deeper than 2000 m.
Fig 9.
Abundance (A) and biomass (B) at stations in relation to depth (from 2000 to 4500 m). Data from 1991 [28], 1993, 1997 [6] and 2012–2015 are shown.
Table 7.
Abundance and biomass of macrofauna at different geographical sites and different depth ranges.
The values are arranged by latitude.