Recent Developments in Coastal Benthic Ecology

Dear Colleagues,

Today, the advances of benthic ecology have increased in the context of marine management and conservation faced with the intensification of human activities and the deployment of Marine Protected Areas. Two decades ago, we entered a new era of benthic research, which has led to the development of new approaches of observation of the seabed, i.e., multi-beam, side-scan, ROV, video, and GPS. The need to evaluate the cumulative impact of human activities in coastal zones in the context of the climatic change has produced an intensification of the number of surveys and descriptions of the coastal marine environment. Moreover, the implementations of national and international directives to assess the ecological status of benthic habitats have stimulated the search for more effective indicators. Furthermore, the available multivariate statistical techniques for identifying benthic assemblages can analyze a large database of quantitative data on benthic samples at different spatiotemporal scales. Coastal benthic communities are colonized by a lot of non-indigenous species, some of which alter the trophic network of such inhabited habitats. However, the main challenge is identifying the respective parts of the effects of climate change and the cumulative effects of human activities on the continental shelf in the functioning and temporal changes of the benthic habitats of this key ecosystem of the marine environment. All these new developments and knowledge around benthic habitats will serve as tools for users and managers to ensure the sustainable function of coastal benthic ecosystems.

Prof. Dr. Jean-Claude Dauvin
Guest Editor

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