www.ecomar.org/polychaetes

The pacific coast region of Southern California and northern Baja California, México has seen rapid growth of its coastal populations as well as an expansion of urban areas due to the richness of this environment, and prevailing socio-economic forces.

The increase in human activity focused along the coast has magnified the risk for exposure of coastal resources to human influence. The constant discharges along the coast is the most obvious result of this increase in land-based activities.

Commercial and sport fishing, tourism, transportation, and industrial activities continually exploit nearshore water resources.
Recently, environmental studies in these habitats have emphasized describing organic enrichment of marine sediments associated with point and non-point sources of pollution and their effects on the environment.

Pollutants, both organic and inorganic that are introduced into ocean systems ultimately sink to the seafloor bottom where they tend to become attached to sediment particles. Once in the sediment, the long-term consequence of such anthropogenic input may well be the permanent alteration of ocean ecosystems. It thus becomes important that coastal water habitats be studied to provide scientific insight, and to assess the influence of human activities.

Critical to our ecological understanding of coastal ocean habitats are ocean bottom communities.

Benthic fauna possess characteristics that make them a useful tool for tracking environmental alterations. They occupy an important intermediate trophic position, and respond differentially to varying environmental conditions.

Additionaly, a strict dependence on the habitat in which they live, along with approriate enough generation times and limited mobility forces benthic organisms to undergo ambient related perturbations through time. Our ability to distinguish how benthic communities change, and furthermore, be able to separate natural from human caused environmental variation is a vital step towards understanding these ecological processes.

Investigating physical and ecological processes that determine the abundance of species in these communities and how they are organized through time, represents a sensitive response, that translates into an indication of ambient alterations.

In this regard, we consider benthic assemblages as the essential biological measure of habitat condition in ocean ecosystems.

Benthic communities, dominated by deposit-feeding polychaete worms have been characterized by a number of hypothesis and models of how organic enrichment affects benthic communities.

The predominance of scientific evidence suggests that --as organic enrichment increases, sediment oxygen demand exceeds oxygen supply. Along a differential gradient of organic matter, at higher concentrations of organic enrichment the most sensitive species will die-off first, leaving opportunistic and pollution-tolerant species to increase in abundance.

The most significant benthic fauna rankings of macrobenthic species in order of occurrence along a gradient of decreasing organic enrichment, denotes prevalent and dominant indicator species are polychaete worms.

Benthic polychaetes characteristically integrate the effects of short and long term environmental variations making them true holistic indicators of water quality, and a direct measure of degradation.

The explicit inclusion of the specific composition of polychaete biota for an area of study reflects an overwhelming majority of information for those habitats. Without the inclusion of such data, we would be projecting our lack of understanding of the ocean realm.

Polychaete Taxonomy and other Invertebrate Fauna
Taxonomia de Poliquetos y de otros Invertebrados
Marine Environmental assesment studies
Estudios de Impacto Ambiental Marino
Marine Ecological Benthic Biodiversity field Surveys
Estudios Benticos Ecologicos Marinos de Biodiversidad
Ecotourism feasability studies
Estudios de viabilidad Ecológica de Turismo
Natural Resource Management and Damage Assessment
Manejo de Recursos Naturales
Marine Environmental effects auditing and monitoring
Auditoria Ecologica y Monitoreo Marino

EcoMar Lab's research focuses on / Las Líneas de investigación fundamentales de EcoMar son:

San Diego, CA. USA / Ensenada, Baja California. México
http://www.ecomar.org
Webcurator: ricardo [at] ecomar.org