Abstract
<p>In the awareness of the increasing conciousness regarding the sensitivity, vulnerability, and<br>complexity of near coastal marine ecosystems, including tidal flats, it is imperative to improve the<br>understanding of its individual elements. One of these elements are organisms habitating the<br>seabed, such as mussels.<br>Bivalves - specifically blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) and pacific oysters (Magallana gigas) - besides<br>other smaller organisms are an integral part of the seabed fauna. On the one hand they serve as a<br>basic food resource for a large number of higher trophic level predator. On the other hand they<br>affect the surface structure, stability and composition of the seabed.<br>To better understand the large fluctuations the mussel stocks underwent during the last decades, it is<br>of great benefit to know the environmental conditions of their habitats. Based on the analysis of<br>different physical parameters at known mussel beds, prototypical automated algorithms were<br>developed and used to identify other tidal flat regions with favorable conditions for epibenthic<br>mussels. The input parameters originate from different morphological, hydrodynamical,<br>sedimentological and hydrochemical numerical models. Morphological factors include<br>morphological activity and gradient conditions of the ground surface, hydrodynamical factors<br>include stream velocities, bottom shear stress, wave orbital velocities, energy of wave breaking and<br>duration of tidal flats falling dry during low tide, sedimentological factors include sediment<br>composition and hydrochemical factors include salinity. These parameters were available as<br>products of the mFUND project EasyGSH-DB and were supplemented with additional evaluations.<br>It is expected that the approach of habitat modeling will allow to determine the possibility of initial<br>and long-term settlements of epibenthic mussels by ruling out intertidal or subtidal seabed areas<br>where environmental parameter combinations do not fulfill the necessary requirements.</p>
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