Hermann Neumann

Thünen Institute | vTI

Microbial composition and diversity in marine sediments are shaped by environmental, biological, and anthropogenic processes that operate on different scales. However, our understanding of benthic microbial biogeography remains limited. Here, we study how benthic microbiota vary at a regional scale in the North Sea with sediment characteristics, te...

Proteomic fingerprinting using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry is a well-established tool for identifying microorganisms and has shown promising results for identification of animal species, particularly disease vectors and marine organisms. And thus can be a vital tool for biodiversity assessments in ecological studies. However, few studies have teste...

The International Bottom Trawl Survey Working Group (IBTSWG) coordinates fishery-inde-pendent bottom trawl surveys in the ICES area in the Northeast Atlantic and the North Sea. These long-term monitoring surveys provide data for stock assessments and facilitate examina-tion of changes in fish distribution and relative abundance. The group also prom...

Ecological communities are constantly changing as a response to environmental and anthropogenic pressures. Yet, how changes in community composition influence the structure of food webs over time and space remains elusive. Using ecological network analysis, we assessed how food web structure changed across six distinct areas of the North Sea over a...

The long-wristed hermit crab Pagurus longicarpus is native to the East Coast of North America from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here we present the first record of this species in the German Wadden Sea. Sixty-one individuals of P. longicarpus were found during a regular fishery survey at nine stations in the Meldorf Bight in late...

The International Bottom Trawl Survey Working Group (IBTSWG) coordinates fishery-inde-pendent multispecies bottom-trawl surveys within the ICES area. These long-term monitoring surveys provide data for stock assessments and facilitate examination of changes in fish distri-bution and abundance. The group also promotes the standardization of fishing...

Taxonomy plays a central role in biological sciences. It provides a communication system for scientists as it aims to enable correct identification of the studied organisms. As a consequence, species descriptions should seek to include as much available information as possible at species level to follow an integrative concept of 'taxonomics'. Here,...

The Arctic Svalbard Archipelago hosts the world's northernmost cold-water 'carbonate factories' thriving here despite of presumably unfavourable environmental conditions and extreme seasonality. Two contrasting sites of intense biogenic carbonate production, the rhodolith beds in Mosselbukta in the north of the archipelago and the barnacle-mollusc...

Ecological communities are constantly being reshaped in the face of environmental change and anthropogenic pressures. Yet, how food webs change over time remains poorly understood. Food web science is characterized by a trade-off between complexity (in terms of the number of species and feeding links) and dynamics. Topological analysis can use comp...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Data from five sites of the International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network in the NorthEastern Pacific, Western Arctic Ocean, Northern Baltic Sea, SouthEastern North Sea and in the Western Mediterranean Sea were analyzed by dynamic factor analysis (DFA) to trace common multi-year trends in abundance and composition of phytoplankton, be...

We establish the new approach of environmental DNA (eDNA) analyses for the North Sea. Our study uses a multigene approach, including the mitochondrial cytochrome-c-oxidase subunit I (COI) gene for analyzing species composition and the nuclear hypervariable region V8 of 18S rDNA for analyzing supraspecific biodiversity. A new minibarcode primer (124...

Taxonomy plays a central role in biological sciences. It provides a communication system for scientists as it aims to enable correct identification of the studied organisms. As a consequence, species descriptions should seek to include as much available information as possible at species level to follow an integrative concept of ‘taxonomics’. Here,...

Identifying patterns in the effects of temperature on species' population abundances could help develop a general framework for predicting the consequences of climate change across different communities and realms. We used long-term population time series data from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species communitieswithin central Europe to comp...

Full-coverage spatial data of occurrence and a detailed description of habitat requirements of epibenthic communities are needed in many conservation and management contexts. In the North Sea the focus has so far been on small benthic infauna, whereas structure and ecosystem functions of larger epifaunal communities have been largely ignored. This...

MARIA S. MERIAN-Cruise Reports. Cruise No. MSM55

Climate change, land-use change, pollution and exploitation are among the main drivers of species’ population trends; however, their relative importance is much debated. We used a unique collection of over 1,000 local population time series in 22 communities across terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms within central Europe to compare the impac...

Background Taxonomic uncertainties in the morphological species identification and taxonomic revisions in individual groups are known for all echinoderm classes. These uncertainties in morphological species identification and discrimination have spawned the application of molecular genetic identification techniques. However, as the fundamental step...

Analysis of ecosystem functioning is essential to describe the ecological status of ecosystems and is therefore directly requested in international directives. There is a lack of knowledge regarding functional aspects of benthic communities and their environmental and anthropogenic driving forces in the southern North Sea. This study linked functio...

Sequence-based specimen identification, known as DNA barcoding, is a common method complementing traditional morphology-based taxonomic assignments. The fundamental resource in DNA barcoding is the availability of a taxonomically reliable sequence database to use as a reference for sequence comparisons. Here we provide a reference library including...

During the last years DNA barcoding has become a popular method of choice for molecular specimen identification. Here we present a comprehensive DNA barcode library of various crustacean taxa found in the North Sea, one of the most extensively studied marine regions of the world. Our data set includes 1,332 barcodes covering 205 species, including...

During the last years, the effectiveness of DNA barcoding for animal species identification has been proven in many studies, analyzing both vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. In terms of marine organisms, however, most barcoding studies typically focus on economically relevant species, for example, fish, as well as on the documentation of hotspots o...

Marine benthic ecosystems are difficult to monitor and assess, which is in contrast to modern ecosystem-based management requiring detailed information at all important ecological and anthropogenic impact levels. Ecosystem management needs to ensure a sustainable exploitation of marine resources as well as the protection of sensitive habitats, taki...

Marine benthic ecosystems are difficult to monitor and assess, which is in contrast to modern ecosystem-based management requiring detailed information at all important ecological and anthropogenic impact levels. Ecosystem management needs to ensure a sustainable exploitation of marine resources as well as the protection of sensitive habitats, taki...

Valid fish species identification is an essential step both for fundamental science and fisheries management. The traditional identification is mainly based on external morphological diagnostic characters, leading to inconsistent results in many cases. Here, we provide a sequence reference library based on mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit...

Marine spatial planning (MSP) requires spatially explicit environmental risk assessment (ERA) frameworks with quantitative or probabilistic measures of risk, enabling an evaluation of spatial management scenarios. ERAs comprise the steps of risk identification, risk analysis, and risk evaluation. A review of ERAs in in the context of spatial manage...

We compiled data from different monitoring surveys to analyse and compare community and diversity patterns of fish, epi- and infauna in the German Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the North Sea in order to identify benthic habitats common to all faunal components. We found congruent community patterns of fish, epi- and infauna for the coastal water...

The angular crab Goneplax rhomboides is native to the north-eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea. It has rarely been reported from the North Sea, with no evidence of sustainable populations. Compiled survey data, however, revealed an increasing abundance of this species in the North Sea since 2000. The data were used to (1) describe the range exp...

Nordsee, Benthos und Klimawandel – Vom Nutzen biologischer Langzeituntersuchungen 71% der Erdoberfläche sind von Meer bedeckt, das sind 360 Millionen km² Meer, von denen bisher nur ein Bruchteil untersucht wurde. Es gibt noch viel zu entdecken, und dennoch fahren Wissen-schaftler von Senckenberg am Meer Jahr für Jahr wieder an die gleichen Orte in...

Species distribution models (SDMs) were applied to predict the distribution of benthic species in the North Sea. An understanding of species distribution patterns is essential to gain insight into ecological processes in marine ecosystems and to guide ecosystem management strategies. Therefore, we compared 9 different SDM methods, including GLM, GB...

Summary We aim to combine classical taxonomic methods with modern aspects of biodiversity research, in particular phylogeography (population genetics and DNA barcoding) and ecological modelling in the climatic sensitive region around Iceland. The sampling area is characterised by several local pecularities like submarine ridges (geographical barrie...

Benthic epifauna was sampled in an area of 10 × 10 nautical miles in the German Bight. Samples were taken in January and July/August from 1998 to 2009. The ecological functioning of the epifaunal community was assessed using biological traits analysis (BTA). Twelve ecological traits of 26 epifaunal species were considered and analysed using non-met...

So far the angular crab Goneplax rhomboides (Linnaeus, 1758) was mostly a northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean species and was quite rare in the North Sea where no evidence for sustainable populations existed. In 2008 and 2009 a total of 82 individuals of Goneplax rhomboides (Linnaeus, 1758) were found at 22 widespread locations in the southern...

Neumann, H., Reiss, H., Rakers, S., Ehrich, S., and Kröncke, I. 2009. Temporal variability in southern North Sea epifauna communities after the cold winter of 1995/1996. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 2233–2243. Epifauna communities in the southeastern North Sea were studied from 1998 to 2008 to evaluate the effect of hydroclimatic change in...

Benthic epifauna in three areas of the northern North Sea was studied from 1999 to 2007 to investigate the effect of temperature changes on community structure and species abundance and biomass. Abundance and/or biomass of 16 epifauna species was significantly correlated with temperature anomalies of the mean sea surface temperature (SST) from 1971...

Benthic epifauna was sampled in an area of 10 x 10 nautical miles in the German Bight. Samples were collected in January and July/August from 1998 to 2007 with a standard 2 m beam trawl, The epibenthic communities were severely affected by the cold winter in 1995-1996, which also resulted in high abundance and biomass of the opportunistic brittle s...

Benthic epifauna was sampled in six areas from the German Bight towards the Norwegian Sea using a 2-m standard beam trawl. Nine replicates were taken in each area and year from 1999 to 2006. This data set (60–67 replicates per area) was used to describe the spatial variability in local species composition and to assess the effect of increasing samp...

The German Small-scale Bottom Trawl Survey (GSBTS) was initiated in 1987 in order to provide com-plementary investigations to the International Bottom Trawl Survey (IBTS) in the North Sea, using the same methodology but focussing high-intensity sampling on selected survey areas. Over the last 20 years, the initial number of 4 survey areas (10 × 10...

Biomass determination of hermit crabs is difficult without destroying the gastropod shells of the specimens. To minimize the number of animals destroyed in the process of determining this parameter over time, the chela-height vs. body-weight relationship of each of the three hermit-crab species was recorded in different areas of the North Sea. Line...