Pristine Seas, National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, United States of America.
Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawai'i, Kāne'ohe, Hawai'i, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2023 Jan 6;18(1):e0279200. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279200. eCollection 2023.
The kelp forests of southern Patagonia have a large diversity of habitats, with remote islands, archipelagos, peninsulas, gulfs, channels, and fjords, which are comprised of a mixture of species with temperate and sub-Antarctic distributions, creating a unique ecosystem that is among the least impacted on Earth. We investigated the distribution, diversity, and abundance of marine macroinvertebrate assemblages from the kelp forests of southern Patagonia over a large spatial scale and examined the environmental drivers contributing to the observed patterns in assemblage composition. We analyzed data from 120 quantitative underwater transects (25 x 2 m) conducted within kelp forests in the southern Patagonian fjords in the Kawésqar National Reserve (KNR), the remote Cape Horn (CH) and Diego Ramírez (DR) archipelagos of southern Chile, and the Mitre Peninsula (MP) and Isla de los Estados (IE) in the southern tip of Argentina. We observed rich assemblages of macroinvertebrates among these kelp forests, with a total of 185 unique taxa from 10 phyla and 23 classes/infraorders across the five regions. The number of taxa per transect was highest at IE, followed by MP, CH, and KNR, with the lowest number recorded at DR. The trophic structure of the macroinvertebrate assemblages was explained mostly by wave exposure (28% of the variation), followed by salinity (12%) and the KNR region (11%). KNR was most distinct from the other regions with a greater abundance of deposit feeders, likely driven by low salinity along with high turbidity and nutrients from terrigenous sources and glacial melt. Our study provides the first broad-scale description of the benthic assemblages associated with kelp forests in this vast and little-studied region and helps to establish baselines for an area that is currently lightly influenced by local anthropogenic factors and less impacted by climate change compared with other kelp forests globally.
巴塔哥尼亚南部的海带林拥有丰富多样的生境，包括偏远岛屿、群岛、半岛、海湾、海峡和峡湾，这些生境由温带和亚南极分布的物种混合而成，构成了一个独特的生态系统，是地球上受干扰最小的生态系统之一。我们在较大的空间尺度上调查了巴塔哥尼亚南部海带林中海洋大型无脊椎动物组合的分布、多样性和丰度，并研究了促成组合组成中观察到的模式的环境驱动因素。我们分析了来自智利南部卡韦萨国家保护区（KNR）、偏远的合恩角（CH）和迭戈·拉米雷斯（DR）群岛、米特雷半岛（MP）和阿根廷南端的火地岛（IE）南部巴塔哥尼亚峡湾中海带林中进行的 120 个定量水下横切（25x2 米）的数据。我们观察到这些海带林中存在丰富的大型无脊椎动物组合，总共有来自 10 个门和 23 个纲/亚纲的 185 个独特分类群。每个横切线上的分类群数量在 IE 最高，其次是 MP、CH 和 KNR，在 DR 最低。大型无脊椎动物组合的营养结构主要由波暴露（28%的变化）解释，其次是盐度（12%）和 KNR 地区（11%）。KNR 与其他地区最为不同，其沉积物食者的丰度较高，这可能是由低盐度以及来自陆源和冰川融化的高浊度和养分驱动的。我们的研究提供了该广阔而研究甚少的地区与海带林相关的底栖组合的首次广泛描述，并有助于为该地区建立基准，该地区目前受当地人为因素的影响较小，与全球其他海带林相比，受气候变化的影响较小。
