Global environmental predictors of benthic marine biogeographic structure.

ABSTRACT: Analyses of how environmental factors influence the biogeographic structure of biotas are essential for understanding the processes underlying global diversity patterns and for predicting large-scale biotic responses to global change. Here we show that the large-scale geographic structure of shallow-marine benthic faunas, defined by existing biogeographic schemes, can be predicted with 89-100% accuracy by a few readily available oceanographic variables; temperature alone can predict 53-99% of the present-day structure along coastlines. The same set of variables is also strongly correlated with spatial changes in species compositions of bivalves, a major component of the benthic marine biota, at the 1° grid-cell resolution. These analyses demonstrate the central role of coastal oceanography in structuring benthic marine biogeography and suggest that a few environmental variables may be sufficient to model the response of marine biogeographic structure to past and future changes in climate.

SUBMITTER: Belanger CL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3435205 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature