A benthic habitat template for Pacific Canada's continental shelf / by E.J. Gregr ... [et al.].: Fs97-18/312E-PDF

"Classifications of the marine environment are essential to inform marine spatial planning strategies such as protected area designation, and can support assessments of the cumulative impacts of human activities and the development of species-habitat associations. The benthic habitat template developed here for the shelf waters (30 - 500 m) of Canada’s Pacific coast is one such classification. The template differs from more common correlation-based approaches in that it uses hypotheses grounded in functional ecology to integrate physical data into a functional description of the benthic environment. We adapted methods originally used on Canada's Atlantic coast to the available data and unique characteristics of Canada’s Pacific coast. We found the habitat template correlated better with benthic diversity than linear geographic distance, corroborating earlier findings from Atlantic Canada. The habitat template, particularly the Disturbance axis, was negatively correlated with the Shannon-Weiner biodiversity index, showing that high disturbance habitats are less diverse. These results demonstrate that the template, by considering the influence of physical drivers on functional adaptation in the classification process, represents an ecologically relevant classification of the marine environment. As such, it has the potential to contribute to Canada's Marine Protected Area strategy by identifying areas of rarity, high diversity, and representativity, important determinants of Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs). Also, the ability to correlate species diversity with distance provides a way to quantitatively identify ecologically significant regional boundaries, something that is critical to understanding the ecology on the coast, and a potentially important refinement to questions of representativity. We expect both the habitat template and the associated sediment grain size model to serve key roles for marine spatial planning on Canada’s Pacific Coast."--Abstract.

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