Benthic macroinvertebrates constitute the link between organic matter input in streams and fishes. However, the possibility of influence of predators on the invertebrates is still a controversial issue. The possibility of alteration of the benthic community by the modification in predation in a stream in the South of Brazil was studied by means of an exclusion experiment under semi-natural cond...

Freshwater inflow is an important source of physical variability in estuaries. Effects of water flow are dynamic, and it is impossible to sample all conditions as they vary over space and time. Benthos, however, are fixed in place, continuously sample the overlying water conditions, and demonstrate a variety of consistent responses to multiple sources of stress. Benthic indices of biotic integr...

The purpose of this study was to document existing benthic organisms of the lower West River in New Haven and West Haven, Connecticut, in order to enable monitoring of salt marsh restoration. Seventeen sites were sampled between the Chapel Street Bridge and the mouth of the West River during the month of July 1995. All sites contained polychaete worms and other organisms typical of estuarine sy...

Bivalve aquaculture introduces high densities of farmed organisms to the natural environment with potential consequences on a number of ecosystem processes, including modification of nutrient fluxes (e.g. NH4, NOX, PO4, and Si(OH)4) and benthic respiration, and may impact benthic communities. Infaunal clam culture may influence the environment due to the clams themselves [their metabolic proces...

This study addresses the impact of spatial scale on explaining variance in benthic communities. In particular, the analysis estimated the fraction of community variation that occurred at a spatial scale smaller than the sampling interval (i.e., the geographic distance between samples). This estimate is important because it sets a limit on the amount of community variation that can be explained ...

Water resources especially lotic ecosystems drain diverse landscapes with their peculiar climatic regime, making them extremely diverse in terms of establishment of complex network of biotic communities, one such component are benthic macroinvertebrates or zoobenthos which are integral components of freshwater systems. They are represented by insects, molluscans, crustaceans, annelids and nemat...

The relationship between surface production and benthic standing stock is fundamental to understanding biogeography in the deep sea. While much has been learned about the complex oceanographic processes involved in energy transfer to the benthos on local scales, the correspondence of overhead production to benthic community structure on regional scales remains poorly characterized. We compiled ...

Ecosystem-level effects of stressors are critical to understanding community regulation, and environmental stress models are useful in describing such effects. Hypoxia is an important stressor in aquatic ecosystems that usually decreases abundance and biomass of benthic fauna. In field surveys, predator abundance is low in hypoxic areas, and in lab experiments, predators reduce their feeding ra...