Infaunal macrobenthos in the Porcupine Bank (NE Atlantic)

Parra Santiago,Lourido Antía,Valencia Joaquín,Vázquez Mari Carmen,Velasco Francisco,Fernández Juan,Baldó Francisco

doi:10.3389/conf.fmars.2016.05.00105

Abstract

Infaunal macrobenthos in the Porcupine Bank (NE Atlantic)

Highlights

The results of the infaunal communities distributions from the annual series surveys PORCUPINE are shown. Those surveys were realized during the months of September and October in the years 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 by the Instituto Español de Oceanografía (IEO) aboard the R/V Vizconde de Eza (Fig. 1C), within the research project ERDEM
The sediments of the majority of the sampled stations are mainly formed by sand, between fine and very fine, except in deep areas of the southeast, where there are large muddy areas with elevated organic content and high selection coefficient
Around the shallowest area, we found thicker sandy sediments, with lower organic content and moderate selection (Fig. 3)

Summary

Introduction

The results of the infaunal communities distributions from the annual series surveys PORCUPINE are shown. For the study of the infaunal macrobenthos a total of 50 samples were analyzed from selected places of the Porcupine Bank, where the bottom characteristics, the climatology or the survey schedule allowed (Fig. 2). Complementary, in order to obtain a better coverage of the sedimentary types from the study area, more than 350 samples were collected with a net collector coupled to the trawling fishing gear (Baca-GAV 39/52; Fig. 1A).

Results

Conclusion