Description
Seagrass habitats support some of the most productive marine communities and provide critical habitat for many fish species. Previous studies have shown that fish communities of seagrass meadows are usually more diverse than those of adjacent habitats. However, most studies have been conducted in very shallow waters and generally have used seining methods to collect fish, which tend to select for slower species as well as small species and size classes. Antillean–Z style fish traps were used to study the fish communities of seagrass and associated habitats in both deep and shallow waters of Shark Bay, Western Australia. While more individuals were caught per trap in vegetated than in unvegetated habitats, the number of species and biomass was influenced by an interaction of depth and seagrass cover. The structure of fish communities was influenced by an interaction among season, seagrass cover, and depth. Unlike previous studies, a small number of species dominated fish trap catches, most notably, striped trumpeters, Pelates sexlineatus Quoy and Gaimard, 1925 and western butterfish, Pentapodus vitta Quoy and Gaimard, 1824. The factors that influenced the abundance of common species, including season, depth, and seagrass cover, often interacted and varied among species. This study suggests that future research on fish communities of seagrass ecosystems would benefit from using several sampling techniques and considering multiple environmental factors simultaneously.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 31 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Heithaus M R, Earl C (2023). Fish communities of subtropical seagrass meadows and associated habitats in Shark Bay, Western Australia: Fishes Checklist. Version 2.4. OBIS Secretariat. Occurrence dataset. https://doi.org/10.25607/yppfqu
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is OBIS Secretariat. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: f5bd704f-8948-43c6-b3c8-27e5e9f37898. OBIS Secretariat publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Ocean Biodiversity Information System.
Keywords
Occurrence
Contacts
- Originator
Geographic Coverage
Shark Bay, Western Australia
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-27.23, 112.868], North East [-24.732, 114.298] |
|---|
Taxonomic Coverage
Fishes
| Superclass | Agnatha |
|---|---|
| Unranked | Chondrichthyes, Osteichthyes |
Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 1997-06-01 / 1999-07-31 |
|---|
Sampling Methods
No Description available
Method step description:
- See Github Project and R Notebook for dataset construction methods
Bibliographic Citations
- Heithaus, Michael. (2004). Fish communities of subtropical seagrass meadows and associated habitats in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Bulletin of Marine Science. 75. 79-99.
Additional Metadata
marine, harvested by iOBIS
| Purpose | These data were made accessible through UNESCO's eDNA Expeditions project to mobilize available marine species and occurrence datasets from World Heritage Sites. |
|---|---|
| Alternative Identifiers | 10.25607/yppfqu |
| f5bd704f-8948-43c6-b3c8-27e5e9f37898 | |
| https://ipt.obis.org/secretariat/resource?r=shark-bay-heithaus-2004 |