Changed sediment composition prevents recovery of macrobenthic community four years after a shoreface nourishment at the Holland coast

Sand nourishment is a widespread management strategy to protect sandy coasts against erosion. Nourishments can impact the benthic fauna directly by burial and indirectly by changing environmental conditions such as bottom shear stress and/or sediment composition (grain size distribution). The macrobenthic community in soft-bottom environments...

A probabilistic framework for windows of opportunity: the role of temporal variability in critical transitions

The establishment of young organisms in harsh environments often requires a window of opportunity (WoO). That is, a short time window in which environmental conditions drop long enough below the hostile average level, giving the organism time to develop tolerance and transition into stable existence. It has been suggested that this kind of...

Comparing grab and dredge sampling for shoreface benthos using ten years of monitoring data from the Sand Motor mega nourishment

Epifauna and infauna are often sampled by different types of sampling devices including grabs, and dredges, depending on various factors such as local environmental conditions, research questions and available budget. Because grabs and dredges have a different species-specific selectivity, both methods could be complementary but for some...

A Mega-Nourishment (Sand Motor) Affects Landscape Diversity of Subtidal Benthic Fauna

The Sand Motor is a very large (20 million m³) nourishment constructed along the coast in The Netherlands. The huge volume of sand is redistributed along the coast by natural forces stemming from tidal currents and waves. For environmental evaluation of this large construction, the benthic subtidal fauna has been sampled prior to...

Exploring the Trophic Spectrum: Placing Mixoplankton Into Marine Protist Communities of the Southern North Sea

While traditional microplankton community assessments focus primarily on phytoplankton and protozooplankton, the last decade has witnessed a growing recognition of photo-phago mixotrophy (performed by mixoplankton) as an important nutritional route among plankton. However, the trophic classification of plankton and subsequent analysis of the...

Tidal flat nematode responses to hypoxia and subsequent macrofauna-mediated alterations of sediment properties

To assess the role of macrofauna-mediated sediment changes on nematode community recovery, we examined the temporal development of macrobenthos, nematode communities and sediment properties following hypoxia in 16 m2 replicated plots over a 6 mo period. Hypoxia drastically changed nematode community composition (i.e. reduced diversity and...