Benthic megafauna from central northeast Atlantic: shedding light on remote habitats

Objectivo

The objectives of the current proposal focus on advancing the current knowledge on video-based habitat mapping, seamount and bathyal benthic community ecology of fish and large invertebrates on the Northeast Atlantic area, providing deliverable information for ocean management. The study areas are important seafloor locations, including Marine Protected Areas, in and out of the EEZ (e.g. Sedlo Seamount, Altair, Anti-Altair and Josephine).

This will provide new insights on deep-sea diversity, landscape ecology and seamount connectivity, addressing the following objectives and research questions:

1. Critical review of underwater platforms and survey methods versus data utility;
2. Identification of benthic assemblages and publication of a catalogue;
3. Comparison of invertebrate assemblages in northeast Atlantic seamounts;
4. Provision of biodiversity datasets to regional, national and global databases (ATLANTIS, M@rbis and OBIS);
5. Evaluate deep-water fish association with benthic habitat;
6. Creation of maps with predictive distributional modelling selected megafaunal and vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) across surveyed depths, including MPAs.

Though the proposed tasks appear considerably extensive the detail of the analysis will depend on the amount of quality video available, which will be tuned to fit the proposed schedule by the amount of sub-sampling of video data