BG Biogeosciences BG Biogeosciences 1726-4189 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/bg-10-5227-2013 Natural variability in hard-bottom communities and possible drivers assessed by a time-series study in the SW Baltic Sea: know the noise to detect the change Wahl M. 1 Hinrichsen H.-H. 1 Lehmann A. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5618-6105 1 Lenz M. 1 GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Duesternbrookerweg 20, 24105 Kiel, Germany 30 07 2013 10 7 5227 5242 Copyright: © 2013 M. Wahl et al. 2013 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/10/5227/2013/bg-10-5227-2013.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/10/5227/2013/bg-10-5227-2013.pdf

In order to detect shifts in community structure and function associated with global change, the natural background fluctuation in these traits must be known. In a 6 yr study we characterized the composition of young benthic communities at 7 sites along the 300 km coast of the Kiel and Lübeck bights in the German Baltic Sea and we quantified their interannual variability of taxonomic and functional composition. Along the salinity gradient from NW to SE, the relative abundance of primary producers decreased while that of heterotrophs increased. Along the same gradient, annual productivity tended to increase. Taxonomic and functional richness were higher in Kiel Bight as compared to Lübeck Bight. With increasing species richness functional group richness showed saturation indicating an increasing functional redundancy in species rich communities. While taxonomic fluctuations between years were substantial, functionality of the communities seem preserved in most cases. Environmental conditions potentially driving these fluctuations are winter temperatures and current regimes. We tentatively define a confidence range of natural variability in taxonomic and functional composition a departure from which might help identifying an ongoing regime shift driven by global change. In addition, we propose to use RELATE, a statistical procedure in the PRIMER (Plymouth Routines in Multivariate Ecological Research) package to distinguish directional shifts in time ("signal") from natural temporal fluctuations ("noise").

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