Abstract
Widespread and ever-increasing anthropogenic impacts in the marine environment are driving a need to develop more efficient survey methods for monitoring changes in marine biodiversity. There is a particular urgent need for survey methods that could more rapidly and effectively detect change in species richness, abundance and community composition. Here, test the suitability of the Mackinnon Lists Technique for use in the marine environment by testing its effectiveness for rapid assessment of fish communities. The MacKinnon Lists Technique is a time-efficient and cost-effective sampling method developed for studying avian tropical biodiversity, in which several list samples of species can be collected from a single survey. Using the well-established MaxN approach on data from deployments of a Baited Remote Underwater Video Systems for comparison, we tested the suitability of the MacKinnon Lists Technique for use in marine environments by analysing tropical reef fish communities. Using both methods for each data set, differences in community composition between depths and levels of protection were assessed. Both methods were comparable for diversity and evenness indices with similar ranks for species. Multivariate analysis showed that the MacKinnon Lists Technique and MaxN detected similar differences in community composition at different depths and protection status. However, the MacKinnon Lists Technique detected significant differences between factors when fewer videos (representing reduced survey effort) were used. We conclude that the MacKinnon Lists Technique is at least as effective as the widely used MaxN method for detecting differences between communities in the marine environment and suggest can do so with lower survey effort. The MacKinnon Lists Technique has the potential to be widely used as an effective new tool for rapid conservation monitoring in marine ecosystems.
Highlights
Monitoring the abundance, diversity and distribution of species helps track the impacts of environmental disturbance, detect changes in population dynamics and enables effective management [1,2,3]
We propose that MacKinnon Lists Technique (MLT) has unique features that may make it useful in the marine environments, in particular in species rich habitats such as coral reefs
We investigate for the first time the ability of MLT to rapidly generate monitoring data for marine fish communities, capable of 1) producing species richness and diversity estimates, 2) providing measures of relative abundance of species, including species targeted by fisheries, 3) detecting ecological relevant differences such as differences in community composition with depth and protection status and 4) its effectiveness at detecting changes in community composition as sampling effort decreases
Summary
Monitoring the abundance, diversity and distribution of species helps track the impacts of environmental disturbance, detect changes in population dynamics and enables effective management [1,2,3] This requires accurate and precise information on species richness, abundance and assemblage composition, permitting the detection of community responses that might be caused by environmental change [4]. In the marine environment a number of sophisticated methods such as mark and recapture, acoustic surveys or destructive methods have been developed to survey and monitor biodiversity for conservation and scientific purposes [7] Many of these methods are costly and time intensive, requiring considerable expertise in terms of data collection and analysis [8,9,10]. This adds considerable challenges to data collection, analysis and interpretation [9,12,13]
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