Table 1.
Mean abundance of infauna and leaf epifauna in Zostera marina meadows.
Fig 1.
Study areas along the Swedish West Coast.
(a) Locations of the 15 sampled seagrass meadows in Sweden. (b) Detailed view of the study sites along the Swedish West Coast: 1. N. Lindholmen; 2. Kvarnekilen; 3. S. Stridsfjorden (Sannäsfjorden); 4. Kämpersvik; 5. Valön; 6. Bottnefjord; 7. Finsbo; 8. Lindholmen; 9. Slussen; 10. Hjältön; 11. Skalhavet; 12. Björnholmen; 13. Kåkenäs; 14. Marstrand; 15. Gottskärsviken. (c) Infauna sampling in a seagrass meadow using a sediment core (QGIS, v3.2, https://qgis.org/).
Table 2.
Biological trait variables and categories for functional matrix construction.
Fig 2.
Mean abundances of dominant infauna species.
Mean abundances (ind.m-2 ± SE) of the most abundant infauna species in each of the 15 Zostera marina meadows sampled in 2018 along the Swedish west coast.
Fig 3.
n-MDS of infaunal assemblages in Zostera marina meadows. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (n-MDS) of replicate samples (n = 88) from 15 Z. marina meadows, based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarity of relative abundances. Points are coloured by site; larger circles with black outlines represent site-level centroids. Vectors indicate taxa most strongly correlated with the ordination (envfit, p ≤ 0.013) (Stress: 0.19; 3D solution). BJRNH, Björnholmen; BTTN, Bottnefjord; FNSB, Finsbo; GTTSK, Gottskärsviken; HJLT, Hjältön; KKNS, Kåkenäs; KMPR, Kämpersvik; LDHL, Lindholmen; MRST, Marstrand; NLH, N. Lindholmen; SKLH, Skalhavet; SLSN, Slussen; STRD, S. Stridsfjorden; VLN, Valön.
Fig 4.
Distance-based redundancy analysis (db-RDA) ordination plot of infaunal assemblages.
The ellipses represent 95% confidence intervals around replicate cores grouped by wave exposure category (sheltered, intermediate, exposed). Black arrows represent the most influential environmental variables structuring infaunal communities across Zostera marina meadows. Only the first two canonical axes are shown.
Table 3.
Multivariate Generalized Linear Model (GLM) results testing the relationship between infaunal assemblage structure and environmental variables in Zostera marina meadows.
Table 4.
Ecological indices and quality status of infaunal communities.
Fig 5.
Functional richness, dispersion, and evenness across large and small epifauna, and infaunal communities and wave exposure levels.
Overall differences in (a) functional richness, (b) functional dispersion, and (c) functional evenness between habitats, as well as across meadows with varying degrees of wave exposure (d–f). Epifauna data extracted from Riera et al. [26].
Table 5.
Correlation between infaunal parameters, epifauna, and environmental variables.