Pål Buhl-Mortensen

Institute of Marine Research in Norway | IMR · Benthic Communities

Interest in the deep Arctic Ocean is rapidly increasing from governments, policy makers, industry, researchers, and conservation groups, accentuated by the growing accessibility of this remote region by surface vessel traffic. In this review, our goal is to provide an updated taxonomic inventory of benthic taxa known to occur in the deep Arctic Oce...

Introduction: Modern stationary observatories, equipped with cameras and other sensors, make it possible to observe and study cold-water corals in situ over increasingly long periods of time. In this study we investigate data collected for a bubblegum coral (Paragorgia arborea) with the LoVe (Lofoten Vesteralen) observatory for a period of 117 days...

Cold-water corals (CWC) in Norwegian waters have been known for more than two centuries, but direct studies of CWC reefs were first enabled with the introduction of new ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) technology in the 1980s. This provided new knowledge about reef ecology and how fisheries have impacted these fragile habitats. In this chapter we pr...

Cold-water corals (CWC) form reef structures in continental margin and seamount settings at tropical, temperate, and even some polar latitudes. This global distribution makes them more widespread than shallow-water reefs, while their role in these regions is no less important than the influence that shallow-water coral reefs have on shallow, tropic...

Management of deep-sea fisheries in areas beyond national jurisdiction by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations/Arrangements (RFMO/As) requires identification of areas with Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs). Currently, fisheries data, including trawl and longline bycatch data, are used by many RFMO/As to inform the identification of VMEs. H...

Fixed underwater observatories (FUO), equipped with digital cameras and other sensors, become more commonly used to record different kinds of time series data for marine habitat monitoring. With increasing numbers of campaigns, numbers of sensors and campaign time, the volume and heterogeneity of the data, ranging from simple temperature time serie...

Thriving and highly diverse cold-water coral reefs were discovered and described in the GTA pipeline corridor and adjacent canyons during the recent survey with the R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen. The newly discovered reefs form a continuum with the Mauritanian mound barrier, the largest known coherent mound province in the world, and are therefore of loc...

Due to various intergovernmental agreements, marine managers must establish marine conservation measures to prevent the destruction of conservation-relevant benthic habitats e.g. Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VME). To aid this process, international “lists” of indicator species and habitats are created based on various conservation “criteria”. As t...

Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) has become a priority for many states wanting to develop national blue economy plans and meet international obligations in response to the increasing cumulative impacts of human activities and climate change. In areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ), MSP is proposed as part of a package of solutions for multi-secto...

To protect and restore ecosystems and biodiversity is one of the 10 challenges identified by the United Nations's Decade of the Ocean Science. In this study we used eDNA from sediments collected in two fjords of the Svalbard archipelago and compared the taxonomic composition with traditional methods through metabarcoding, targeting mitochondrial CO...

The Madeira archipelago has a unique underwater landscape that is characterised by narrow shelves, steep slopes and a large submarine tributary system that boosts primary productivity in oligotrophic waters and thus offers a potential for hotspots of biodiversity. Despite this, there have been limited deep-water exploration activities with less tha...

The joint ICES/NAFO Working Group on Deep-water Ecology (WGDEC) collates new information on the distribution of Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs) for use in annual ICES advisory processes and the development of new methods/techniques to further our understanding of deep-sea ecosystems, and further suggests novel management tools to ensure human a...

Sea pens are considered to be of conservation relevance according to multiple international legislations and agreements. Consequently, any information about their ecology and distribution should be of use to management decision makers. This study aims to provide such information about six taxa of sea pen in Norwegian waters [ Funiculina quadrangula...

In January 2015, the Norwegian government decided that mapping of habitat types shall be carried out using the most objective, value neutral and verifiable methodology possible, with emphasis on mapping the most valuable habitat types first. The government wanted to prioritize mapping of habitat types that are either endangered, important for many...

The use of habitat distribution models (HDMs) has become common in benthic habitat mapping for combining limited seabed observations with full-coverage environmental data to produce classified maps showing predicted habitat distribution for an entire study area. However, relatively few HDMs include oceanographic predictors, or present spatial valid...

The use of species occurrence as a proxy for habitat type is widespread, probably because it allows the use of species distribution modeling (SDM) to cost-effectively map the distribution of e.g., vulnerable marine ecosystems. We have modeled the distribution of epibenthic megafaunal taxa typical of soft-bottom, Deep-Sea Sponge Aggregations (DSSAs)...

Andfjorden Marine Protection Area is a large area which stretches from the inner fjords to the ocean. The area has a varied topography which gives rise to habitats for a range of marine species. Here is shrimp fields and breeding areas for cod, Atlantic halibut, wrasses and Norway haddock. Nature types like kelp forest, shell sand and maerlbeds hav...

The joint ICES/NAFO Working Group on Deep-water Ecology (WGDEC) collates new information on the distribution of Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs) for use in annual ICES advisory processes and the development of new methods/techniques to further our understanding of deep-sea ecosystems, and further suggests novel management tools to ensure human a...

In this paper, we describe the species composition of biotopes occurring in a wide range of environments and present their geographic distribution based on results from quantitative analyses of video-records collected as part of the Norwegian seabed mapping program MAREANO. We present results from an analysis of annotated video records at 757 stati...

Cold-water corals are habitat-forming species that are also classified as indicators of vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) due to the threat of various anthropogenic impacts, e.g., fisheries and oil/mineral exploration. To best protect VMEs, knowledge of their habitat requirements and distribution is essential. However, comprehensive sampling of t...

In the deep waters of the Nordic Seas and adjacent areas, several benthic habitats such as cold-water coral reefs, coral gardens, and deep-sea sponge aggregations have been classified as vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs), due to their uniqueness, limited spatial extent, physical fragility, and slow recovery rate. In the last decade observations c...

Video and image data are regularly used in the field of benthic ecology to document biodiversity. However, their use is subject to a number of challenges, principally the identification of taxa within the images without associated physical specimens. The challenge of applying traditional taxonomic keys to the identification of fauna from images has...

Knowledge on basic biological functions of organisms is essential to understand not only the role they play in the ecosystems but also to manage and protect their populations. The study of biological processes, such as growth, reproduction and physiology, which can be approached in situ or by collecting specimens and rearing them in aquaria, is par...

Video and image data are regularly used in the field of benthic ecology to document biodiversity. However, their use is subject to a number of challenges, principally the identification of taxa within the images without associated physical specimens. The challenge of applying traditional taxonomic keys to the identification of fauna from images has...

The joint ICES/NAFO Working Group on Deep-water Ecology (WGDEC) collates new information on the distribution of Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs) for use in annual ICES advisory processes and the development of new methods/techniques to further our understanding of deep-sea ecosystems, and further suggests novel management tools to ensure human a...

An array of sensors, including an HD camera mounted on a Fixed Underwater Observatory (FUO) were used to monitor a cold-water coral (Lophelia pertusa) reef in the Lofoten-Vesterålen area from April to November 2015. Image processing and deep learning enabled extraction of time series describing changes in coral colour and polyp activity (feeding)....

Vulnerable marine ecosystems in Arctic waters

In Norwegian only: Veilederens hovedformål er å bidra til at resultatene av praktisk kartlegging i sjø i henhold til NiNs type og beskrivelsessystem blir så gode som mulig og sammenlignbare på tvers av kartleggere. Dette innebærer å beskrive hvordan, og i hvilken grad, den observerte naturvariasjonen bør forenkles under kartlegging. Veilederen skal...

Cold-water coral habitats are constituted by a great variety of anthozoan taxa, with reefs and gardens being homes for numerous invertebrates and ish species. In the cold temperate North Atlantic, some coral habitats such as Lophelia pertusa reefs, and Primnoa/Paragorgia dominated coral gardens occur on both sides of the Atlantic over a wide latitu...

Bottom trawling and seabed littering are two serious threats to seabed integrity. We present an overview of the distribution of seabed litter and bottom trawling in Norwegian waters (the Norwegian Sea and the southern Barents Sea). Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) records and trawl marks (TM) on the seabed were used as indicators of pressure and impa...

Cold-water coral ecosystems differ from each other greatly in structure, faunal makeup, and ecological function. Attributes such as substrate type, 3-D complexity, biological community, and nutrient supply also change over small temporal and spatial scales. In this chapter, we present an overview of food gathering strategies employed by a range of...

Litter has been found in all marine environments and is accumulating in seabirds and mammals in the Nordic Seas. These ecosystems are under pressure from climatic change and fisheries while the human population is small. The marine landscapes in the area range from shallow fishing banks to deep-sea canyons. We present density, distribution and comp...

Fifteen Lophelia reefs from offshore to coastal areas off northern Norway were studied using video. Health status of the coral habitat (degree of physical impact, % cover of living tissue, colony size), occurrence of trawl marks and lost fishing gear, height of coral colonies and associated fauna were analysed from 44 video-lines. Fishing impact wa...

For the first time, we describe a cold-water coral reef complex in Atlantic Canada, discovered at the shelf break, in the mouth of the Laurentian Channel. The study is based on underwater video and sidescan sonar. The reef complex covered an area of approximately 490 × 1300 m, at 280–400 m depth. It consisted of several small mounds (<3 m high) whe...

Mapping trawling pressure on the benthic habitats is needed as background to support an ecosystem approach to fisheries management. The extent and intensity of bottom trawling on the European continental shelf (0–1000 m) was analysed from logbook statistics and vessel monitoring system data for 2010–2012 at a grid cell resolution of 1 x� 1 min long...

Given the need to describe, analyze and index large quantities of marine imagery data for exploration and monitoring activities, a range of specialized image annotation tools have been developed worldwide. Image annotation - the process of transposing objects or events represented in a video or still image to the semantic level, may involve human i...

Fixed underwater observatories (FUOs) equipped with a variety of sensors including cameras, allow long-term monitoring with a high temporal resolution of a limited area of interest. FUOs equipped with HD cameras enable in situ monitoring of biological activity, such as live cold-water corals on a level of detail down to individual polyps. We presen...

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The distribution of cold-water coral reefs is relatively well known in the North-east Atlantic as compared to the Central-east Atlantic, where only a few documentations exist from low latitudes. In 2012 an initial survey was conducted on a reef situated at 400 m depth on the continental shelf off Ghana. The reef corals and fauna were visually docum...

The meeting was held at the Natural England Office in Winchester (UK) from the 9th to the 11th of May, 2016. The meeting was planned to coincide with the end of the GeoHab conference that was also held in Winchester the previous week. The meeting was attended by 11 members from 6 countries. The first day of the meeting dealt with ToR A (Internation...

Cold-water coral ecosystems differ from each other greatly in structure, faunal makeup, and ecological function. Attributes such as substrate type, 3-D complexity, biological community, and nutrient supply also change over small temporal and spatial scales. In this chapter, we present an overview of food gathering strategies employed by a range of...

One of the main goals of marine spatial management is to promote a sustainable use of marine resources without putting biodiversity and habitats at risk. Environmental status assessments of benthic habitats have traditionally been conducted on soft bottom infauna communities. These communities represent only a limited part of the total diversity of...

Bottom-trawl fisheries are expanding into deeper habitats and higher latitudes, but our understanding of their effects in these areas is limited. The ecological importance of habitat-forming megabenthos and their vulnerability to trawling is acknowledged, but studies on effects are few. Our objective was to investigate chronic effects of otter traw...

There are few in situ observations of deep-sea macrofauna, due to the remoteness of this ecosystem. Visual surveys conducted for marine management by MAREANO, (marine area database for Norwegian waters) and the petroleum industry (by SERPENTS, scientific and environmental remotely operated vehicle partnership using existing industrial technology) h...

Habitat conservation, and hence conservation of biodiversity hinges on knowledge of the spatial distribution of habitats, not least those that are particularly valuable or vulnerable. In offshore Norway, benthic habitats are systematically surveyed and described by the national programme MAREANO (Marine AREAl database for NOrwegian waters). Benthic...

MAREANO is an interdisciplinary programme mapping Norwegian offshore bathymetry, geology, biology and geochemistry. Following bathymetric mapping by the Norwegian Hydrographic Service, biological and geological sampling are undertaken by the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) and the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) to obtain visual (video) and ph...

On 16th February 2015, the joint ICES/NAFO WGDEC, chaired by Neil Golding (UK) and attended by fourteen members (eleven in person, three via WebEx) met in Horta, Faial, Azores to consider the terms of reference (ToR) listed in Section 2. WGDEC was requested to provide all new information on the distribution of vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) in...

Polyp expansion state in Lophelia pertusa was studied in situ close to an oil rig during the drilling of a well (Statoil) off mid-Norway, in order to study possible effects on behaviour. The expansion state was monitored visually during the discharge of drill cuttings at one reef exposed to discharges and one not exposed. The reef situated