Martin Zuschin

University of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Paläontologie

Long-term baseline data that allow tracking how predator–prey interactions have responded to intensifying human impacts are often lacking. Here, we assess temporal changes in benthic community composition and interactions between drilling predatory gastropods and their molluscan prey using the Holocene fossil record of the shallow northern Adriatic...

The fossil record of drill holes on molluscan shells left by carnivorous predators has often been used to test the evolutionary impact of ecological interactions. Ecological experiments document a significant change in the predatory behavior of drillers due to competition and predict a substantial influence of such interaction on predator-prey dyna...

Species diversity increases with the temporal grain of samples according to the species–time relationship (STR), impacting palaeoecological analyses because the temporal grain (time averaging) of fossil assemblages varies by several orders of magnitude. We predict a positive relation between total abundance and sample size‐independent diversity (AD...

We report new data on non-indigenous invertebrates from the Mediterranean Sea (four ostracods and 20 molluscs), including five new records for the basin: the ostracods Neomonoceratina iniqua , Neomonoceratina aff. mediterranea , Neomonoceratina cf. entomon , Loxoconcha cf. gisellae (Arthropoda: Crustacea)–the first records of non-indigenous ostraco...

The youngest fossil record is a crucial source of data documenting the recent history of marine ecosystems and their long-term alteration by humans. However, human activities that reshape communities and habitats also alter sedimentary and biological processes that control the formation of the sedimentary archives recording those impacts. These div...

Native biodiversity loss and invasions by nonindigenous species (NIS) have massively altered ecosystems worldwide, but trajectories of taxonomic and functional reorganization remain poorly understood due to the scarcity of long-term data. Where ecological time series are available, their temporal coverage is often shorter than the history of anthro...

The youngest fossil record is a crucial source of data documenting the recent history of marine ecosystems and their long-term alteration by humans. However, human activities that reshape communities and habitats also alter sedimentary and biological processes that control the formation of the sedimentary archives recording those impacts. These div...

Near-time conservation palaeobiology uses palaeontological, archaeological and other geohistorical records to study the late Quaternary transition of the biosphere from its pristine past to its present-day, human-altered state. Given the scarcity of data on recent extinctions in the oceans, geohistorical records are critical for documenting human-d...

Conservation palaeobiology informs conservation and restoration of ecosystems by using the fossil record to discriminate between baseline and novel states and to assess ecosystem response to perturbations. Variability in the time scale of palaeobiological data can generate patterns that either exaggerate or mute the magnitude of biotic changes. We...

Line Intercept Transects (LIT), Point Intercept Transects (PIT), and Photoquadrats (PQ) are the most common quantitative sampling techniques in modern and fossil coral reefs. Data from coral reefs obtained by the different methods are generally compared between various reef ages and localities. Quaternary reefs from warmer interglacial periods, whi...

Mesopelagic fishes are an important element of marine food webs, a huge, still mostly untapped food resource and great contributors to the biological carbon pump, whose future under climate change scenarios is unknown. The shrinking of commercial fishes within decades has been an alarming observation, but its causes remain contended. Here, we inves...

Carbonate skeletal remains are altered and disintegrate at yearly to decadal scales in present‐day shallow‐marine environments with intense bioerosion and dissolution. Present‐day brachiopod death assemblages are invariably characterized by poor preservation on continental shelves, and abundant articulated shells of brachiopods with complete brachi...

Evaluating the history of human impacts on marine ecosystems based on sediment cores is challenging on shelves characterised by very slow sedimentation. To assess the stratigraphic expression of such impacts in the condensed deposits of an epicontinental sea, we analysed a 3-m-long core collected at 31 m water depth off the Po prodelta in the North...

Death assemblages (DAs) are increasingly recognized as a valuable source to reconstruct past ecological baselines, due to the accumulation of skeletal material of non-contemporaneous cohorts. We here quantify the age and time-averaging of DAs on shallow subtidal (5–25 m) rocky substrates and in meadows of Posidonia oceanica in the eastern Mediterra...

Biogeographical patterns are increasingly modified by the human-driven translocation of species, a process that accelerated several centuries ago. Observational datasets, however, rarely range back more than a few decades, implying that a large part of invasion histories went unobserved. Small-sized organisms, like benthic foraminifera, are more li...

The accelerating pace of global change requires better understanding of the long-term resilience and adaptive capacities of marine ecosystems. This volume brings together studies that demonstrate how combining palaeoecological records with other types of geohistorical data informs biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management by providing data...

Mesopelagic fishes are an important element of marine food webs, a huge, still mostly untapped food resource, and great contributors to the biological carbon pump, whose future under climate change scenarios are unknown. The shrinking of commercial fishes within decades has been an alarming observation, but its causes remain contended. Here, we inv...

Inferring the composition of pre-Anthropocene baseline communities on the basis of death assemblages (DAs) preserved in a surface mixed layer requires discriminating among recently-dead shells sourced by living populations and older shells from extirpated populations. Here, we assess the distribution of postmortem ages in the DA formed by the brach...

Millepora, a hydrozoan coral, is a common component in modern tropical reefs throughout the world. In ecological and palaeoecological surveys, it is often grouped with scleractinian corals, which are the prevailing builders of coral reefs. On modern, current-exposed reefs in the Red Sea, Millepora can become the dominant coral. However, it is rarel...

Time averaging of fossil assemblages determines temporal precision of paleoecological and geochronological inferences. Taxonomic differences in intrinsic skeletal durability are expected to produce temporal mismatch between co-occurring species, but the importance of this effect is difficult to assess due to lack of direct estimates of time averagi...

Evaluation of the impact of climatic changes on the composition of fish assemblages requires quantitative measures that can be compared across space and time. In this respect, the mean temperature of the catch (MTC) approach has been proven to be a very useful tool for monitoring the effect of climate change on fisheries catch. Lack of baseline dat...

Predation has strongly shaped past and modern marine ecosystems, but the scale dependency of patterns in drilling predation, the most widely used proxy for predator–prey interactions in the fossil record, is a matter of debate. To assess the effects of spatial and taxonomic scale on temporal trends in the drilling frequencies (DFs), we analyzed Hol...

Although the depth of bioturbation can be estimated on the basis of ichnofabric, the timescale of sediment mixing (reworking) and irrigation (ventilation) by burrowers that affects carbonate preservation and biogeochemical cycles is difficult to estimate in the stratigraphic record. However, pyrite linings on the interior of shells can be a signatu...

The Eastern Mediterranean Sea hosts more non-indigenous species than any other marine region, yet their impacts on the native biota remain poorly understood. Focusing on mollusks from the Israeli rocky intertidal, we explored the hypothesis that this abiotically harsh habitat supports a limited trait diversity, and thus may promote niche overlap an...

Aim A large body of ecological theory predicts that non‐indigenous species (NIS) are successful invaders if their niches overlap little with native taxa. Native–non‐indigenous trait dissimilarity, however, may also be observed if NIS have outcompeted ecologically similar native species. Discriminating these scenarios is essential for assessing inva...

Late Triassic and early Jurassic dikes and fissures in the Dachstein Limestone in the Northern Calcareous Alps harbor mass occurrences of the rhynchonellide brachiopods Sulcirostra juvavica and Halorella amphitoma. To test recent hypotheses about their paleoecology, we characterized these habitats using petrography, carbon stable isotopes, and trac...

A sequence stratigraphic framework predicts that time averaging and hiatus durations will be long at times of fastest sea-level rise. This prediction does not necessarily apply to environments where carbonate production keeps up with sea-level rise and where undetected hiatuses decouple short-term from long-term sedimentation rates. The taphonomic...

Shallow coastal seas play an important role in the economy of many countries by sustaining fisheries, tourism, aquaculture and other economic activities. Their exploitation has large-scale ecosystem effects that are easily overlooked, as they often built up over decades or centuries, and historical ecological reference data are rarely available. He...

Although the depth of bioturbation can be estimated on the basis of ichnofabric, the time scale of sediment mixing and irrigation by burrowers that affects carbonate preservation and biogeochemical cycles is difficult to estimate in the stratigraphic record. However, pyrite linings on interior of shells can be a signature of slow mixing and irrigat...

The direct carbonate procedure for accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon (AMS ¹⁴ C) dating of submilligram samples of biogenic carbonate without graphitization is becoming widely used in a variety of studies. We compare the results of 153 paired direct carbonate and standard graphite ¹⁴ C determinations on single specimens of an assortment of b...

Global warming causes the poleward shift of the trailing edges of marine ectotherm species distributions. In the semi-enclosed Mediterranean Sea, continental masses and oceanographic barriers do not allow natural connectivity with thermophilic species pools: as trailing edges retreat, a net diversity loss occurs. We quantify this loss on the Israel...

Palaeoecological data are unique historical archives that extend back far beyond the last several decades of ecological observations. However, the fossil record of continental shelves has been perceived as too coarse (with centennial-millennial resolution) and incomplete to detect processes occurring at yearly or decadal scales relevant to ecology...

Beta diversity, the compositional variation among communities, is often associated with environmental gradients. Other drivers of beta diversity include stochastic processes, priority effects, predation, or competitive exclusion. Temporal turnover may also explain differences in faunal composition between fossil assemblages. To assess the drivers o...

The Cenozoic genus Terebratula seems to be an exception to the post-Permian trend in brachiopod retreat to offshore habitats, because it was species rich and numerically abundant in warm-temperate shallow-water environments in the Mediterranean and the Paratethys realms. This was so despite the general dominance of bivalves and the pervasive biotur...

Sediments of the NW Adriatic Sea preserve important information about environmental changes during the Holocene and due to recent anthropogenic impact. This study is based on new data of a 3-m-long gravity core taken from 31 m water depth. Large environmental and ecological shifts are indicated by changes in geochemistry (XRF core scanning data, ge...

Studies of paleocommunities and trophic webs assume that multispecies assemblages consist of species that coexisted in the same habitat over the duration of time averaging. However, even species with similar durability can differ in age within a single fossil assemblage. Here, we tested whether skeletal remains of different phyla and trophic guilds...

Carbonate sediments in non‐vegetated habitats on the north‐east Adriatic shelf are dominated by shells of molluscs. However, the rate of carbonate molluscan production prior to the 20th Century eutrophication and overfishing on this and other shelves remains unknown because: (i) monitoring of ecosystems prior to the 20th Century was scarce; and (ii...

Table S1. Absolute abundances of molluscs in two cores at Piran 1 and Piran 2, including two surface living assemblages collected by Van Veen grabs at the same sites in 2014.

Table S3. Amino acid racemization data and calibrated estimates of post‐mortem age of Corbula gibba and Piran 2.

Table S2. Amino acid racemization data and calibrated estimates of post‐mortem age of Gouldia minima collected from the shell bed at Piran 1 and Piran 2.

Table S4. Absolute abundances of molluscs in living assemblages collected by Van Veen grabs at 11 stations in 2011.

The shallow northern Adriatic Sea has a long history of anthropogenic impacts that reaches back many centuries. While the effects of eutrophication, overfishing, pollution, and trawling over recent decades have been extensively studied, the major ecological turnovers during the Holocene as a whole remain poorly explored. In this study, we reconstru...

We present the first systematic description of a Tortonian (late Miocene) gastropod assemblage from the Ambug Hill section in the Tutong District in Brunei Darussalam. The low-diversity assemblage comprises 62 species of which 37 are unknown from other Neogene faunas of the Indo-West Pacific Region (IWP), 23 species are formally described as new. C...

We present the first systematic description of a Tortonian (late Miocene) gastropod assemblage from the Ambug Hill section in the Tutong District in Brunei Darussalam. The low-diversity assemblage comprises 62 species of which 37 are unknown from other Neogene faunas of the Indo-West Pacific Region (IWP), 23 species are formally described as new. C...

Suppl_data-table_S02 – Supplemental material for Molluscan benthic communities at Brijuni Islands (northern Adriatic Sea) shaped by Holocene sea-level rise and recent human eutrophication and pollution

Supplement_data-table_S01 – Supplemental material for Molluscan benthic communities at Brijuni Islands (northern Adriatic Sea) shaped by Holocene sea-level rise and recent human eutrophication and pollution

An increase in the frequency of hypoxia, mucilages, and sediment pollution occurred in the 20th century in the Adriatic Sea. To assess the effects of these impacts on bivalves, we evaluate temporal changes in size structure of the opportunistic bivalve Corbula gibba in four sediment cores that cover the past ~500 years in the northern, eutrophic pa...

During the early Pliocene, subaqueous delta‐scale clinoforms developed in the Águilas Basin, in a mixed temperate carbonate–siliciclastic system. The facies distribution is consistent with the infralittoral prograding wedge model. Stacking patterns and bounding surfaces indicate that the clinoforms formed during the highstand and falling sea‐level...

Estimating the effects and timing of anthropogenic impacts on the composition of macrobenthic communities is challenging, because early twentieth-century surveys are sparse and the corresponding intervals in sedimentary sequences are mixed by bioturbation. Here, to assess the effects of eutrophication on macrobenthic communities in the northern Adr...

The effects of and the interplay between natural and anthropogenic influences on the composition of benthic communities over long time spans are poorly understood. Based on a 160-cm-long sediment core collected at 44 m water depth in the NE Adriatic Sea (Brijuni Islands, Croatia), we document changes in molluscan communities since the Holocene tran...

Polar marine regions are facing rapid changes induced by climate change, with consequences for local faunal populations, but also for overall ecosystem functioning, goods and services. Yet given the complexity of polar marine ecosystems, predicting the mode, direction and extent of these consequences remains challenging. Trait-based approaches are...

To uncover changes in diversity patterns through time, it is useful to analyze faunas with minimal preservational bias from different time periods. Due to the wealth of well-preserved fossils from different habitats, the Middle to Upper Triassic Cassian Formation is very well suited to test hypotheses on the principles of diversity assembly and to...

Measures of diversity and ecology of marine invertebrate assemblages depend on a variety of factors including environmental conditions and methodological decisions. In this study, the influence of such factors on multi- and univariate assemblage parameters of molluscan death assemblages from the Gulf of Aqaba (Red Sea, Jordan) was evaluated. Sedime...

Human disturbance modifies selection regimes, depressing native species fitness and enabling the establishment of non-indigenous species with suitable traits. A major impediment to test the effect of disturbance on invasion success is the lack of long-term data on the history of invasions. Here, we overcome this problem and reconstruct the effect o...

This supplement presents image sources as one example to help overcome lack of trait data in polar (and other) areas. Pros and cons are discussed.

This supplement explains how the 323 (standardized) traits found via our literature survey of 233 marine trait-based studies where grouped into 20 topical clusters (see Supplement 1: Degen EcolIndApp1 2018). Based on these 20 clusters the Table 2 in the main text was constructed.

This supplement (excel spread sheet) includes the references to 233 peer-reviewed publications that focus on marine species traits. Additional to the reference, the ecosystem component, research topic, trait label, and source are given. The trait labels are listed 1) as occurring in the original reference, 2) in a standardized form, and 3) belongin...

Many marine ecosystems worldwide are affected by eutrophication and hypoxia. A major increase in the frequency of hypoxia, mucilages, bottom trawling, and sediment pollution occurred in the 20th century in the Gulf of Trieste (northern Adriatic Sea). To assess the effects of these anthropogenic impacts on body size of bivalves, we evaluate temporal...

The ‘Lessepsian invasion’ – the massive influx of Indo-Pacific biota into the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal – is the largest marine biological invasion. The lack of data on pre-invasion community composition, however, severely impairs our understanding to which degree the taxonomic and functional composition of shallow-water assemblages has...

The ‘Lessepsian invasion’ – the massive influx of Indo-Pacific biota into the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal – is the largest marine biological invasion. The lack of data on pre-invasion community composition, however, severely impairs our understanding to which degree the taxonomic and functional composition of shallow-water assemblages has...

Beta diversity, the compositional variation among communities or assemblages, is crucial to understanding the principles of diversity assembly. The mean pairwise proportional dissimilarity expresses overall heterogeneity of samples in a dataset and is among the most widely used and most robust measures of beta diversity. Obtaining a complete list o...

The molluscan assemblages in a sediment core from the north-eastern Adriatic show significant compositional changes over the past 10,000 yrs related to (1) natural deepening driven by the post-glacial sea-level rise, (2) increasing abundance of skeletal sand and gravel, and (3) anthropogenic impacts. The transgressive phase (10,000–6000 BP) is char...

Body size is a synthetic functional trait determining many key ecosystem properties. Reduction in average body size has been suggested as one of the universal responses to global warming in aquatic ecosystems. Climate change, however, coincides with human-enhanced dispersal of alien species and can facilitate their establishment. We address effects...

In sediment cores spanning ~500 years of history in the Gulf of Trieste, down-core changes in molluscan community structure are characterized by marked shifts in species and functional composition. Between the 16th and 19th century, a strong heavy metal contamination of the sediments, most notably by Hg, together with the effects of natural climati...

Abundance and functional categorisation of mollusc species. The dataset contains also max. size information for each species; last two rows list abundance of ophiuroid arm ossicles and oral plates. (XLSX)

Grain size distribution and geochemical data. (XLSX)

Down-core trends of ophiuroidean ossicles and K. bidentata. (TIF)

Numerical and taxonomic resolution of compositional data sets affects investigators’ abilities to detect and measure relationships between communities and environmental factors. We test whether varying numerical (untransformed, square-root- and fourth-root-transformed relative abundance and presence–absence data) and taxonomic (species, genera, fam...

In the northern Adriatic Sea and in most semienclosed coastal regions worldwide, hypoxia induced by eutrophication in the late 20 th century caused major die-offs of coastal marine organisms. However, ecosystem responses to hypoxia over longer centennial scales are unclear because the duration of direct observations is limited to a few decades and/...