Koo Bon Joo, Seo Jaehwan, Jang Min Seong
East Sea Environment Research Center, Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology (KIOST), Uljin 36315, Korea.
School of Ocean Science, University of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34113, Korea.
Animals (Basel). 2022 Oct 21;12(20):2878. doi: 10.3390/ani12202878.
Biomass and abundance are fundamental parameters in ecology, conservation biology, and environmental impact assessment. Distinguishing features, such as burrow openings and feeding pellets, made by different intertidal macroinvertebrate species on the surface are used as proxies to establish the abundance of intertidal macroinvertebrates. This study investigated the feasibility of estimating biomass from the burrow opening dimensions as a proxy. We analyzed the relationship between the burrow opening dimensions and body weights of intertidal macroinvertebrates and compared surface deposit feeders with suspension feeders. Regression analysis evaluated the relationship between burrow opening diameter, body size, and biomass. The diameters of surface deposit feeder burrow openings were significantly related to biomass, but this was not the case for suspension feeders. Our results indicate that burrow opening dimensions can be used as a proxy to estimate the biomass of surface deposit feeders. However, additional studies are needed to clarify further the relationship between the burrow opening diameter and biomass of the suspension feeders. This is a preliminary study to spatially quantify the biomass of intertidal macroinvertebrates by extracting the dimension of burrow openings from drone images through object detection tools.
生物量和丰度是生态学、保护生物学及环境影响评估中的基本参数。潮间带不同大型无脊椎动物物种在表面留下的独特特征，如洞穴开口和粪便颗粒，被用作确定潮间带大型无脊椎动物丰度的替代指标。本研究调查了通过洞穴开口尺寸估算生物量作为替代指标的可行性。我们分析了潮间带大型无脊椎动物洞穴开口尺寸与体重之间的关系，并比较了表面沉积取食者和悬浮取食者。回归分析评估了洞穴开口直径、体型和生物量之间的关系。表面沉积取食者的洞穴开口直径与生物量显著相关，但悬浮取食者并非如此。我们的结果表明，洞穴开口尺寸可作为估算表面沉积取食者生物量的替代指标。然而，需要进一步研究以更清楚地阐明悬浮取食者洞穴开口直径与生物量之间的关系。这是一项初步研究，通过利用目标检测工具从无人机图像中提取洞穴开口尺寸，对潮间带大型无脊椎动物的生物量进行空间量化。
