Spatial distribution of benthic flora and fauna of costal Placentia Bay, an ecologically and biologically significant area of the island of Newfoundland, Atlantic Canada

Mackin-McLaughlin, Julia (2023) Spatial distribution of benthic flora and fauna of costal Placentia Bay, an ecologically and biologically significant area of the island of Newfoundland, Atlantic Canada. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (6MB)

Abstract

Coastal habitats are not only hotspots of biodiversity and ecosystem services, but are also hotspots for human development and exploitation, causing stress that threatens their sustainability. Overlap of coastal ecosystems with regions of high anthropogenic impacts requires developing a baseline that captures the present benthic composition with inclusion of the fundamental ecology of organisms interacting with their environment. This study establishes a baseline describing benthic organisms present along the western coast of Placentia Bay, a declared Ecologically and Biologically Significant Area (EBSA) of the Island of Newfoundland, Canada. The interactions of the four identified epifaunal assemblages and two dominant macrophyte species with their physical environment were modelled with a new modelling technique: Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM). Each developed model determined the inclusion of fine-scale (< 1 m) substrate % coverage as crucial to understanding the distribution of both epifauna and flora. This study also found that the epifaunal assemblage with the greatest coverage contains the highest species richness and that there is extensive coverage by the two target macrophytes. This baseline can be used to inform future monitoring of Placentia Bay’s coastal ecosystem and observe changes that may occur.

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