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First comprehensive inventory of the entire Baltic sea floor

Map of the distribution of 10 most frequent macrozoobenthos communities
Map of the distribution of 10 most frequent macrozoobenthos communities, based on abundance of the occurring species (Graph: IOW / M. Gogina; for the map key, please click link underneath the full-text press release)

The renowned ICES Journal of Marine Science published most recently the first comprehensive survey of the distribution of macrozoobenthos communities in the entire Baltic Sea – a study done by the IOW scientists Mayya Gogina and Michael Zettler and a team of co-authors. Based on the abundance of certain species at more than 7.000 locations, they identified 10 major communities. In the most northern areas, benthic communities with only few major key species belonging to crustaceans, polychaetes and bivalves (e.g. Monoporeia affinis, Marenzelleria spp. und Macoma balthica, respectively) exist. They dominate most of the Baltic Sea north of the Bornholm Basin, which means nearly 60 % of the whole sea floor of the Baltic

Read the full press release:

application/pdf 20160620_presse_Inventory_Baltic Sea_en.pdf (121.6 KiB)

image/jpeg 1b_Lebensgemeinschaften_Ostseegrund_Legende.jpg (356.3 KiB)

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