Paloma Lucena-Moya

Tvärminne Zoological Station - University of Helsinki · Benthic Ecology Team Tvärminne

The exchange between the water column and the seafloor is a complex process, and is particularly intensive in the shallow waters of highly productive coastal areas, where the temporal variability in the inputs of pelagic organic matter will determine many aspects of the benthic community structure. However, few studies have focused on the seasonali...

We studied the contribution of environmental and spatial factors in determining the metacommunity dynamics of benthic macroinvertebrates in ocean-exposed sandy beaches. A combination of different metacommunity models contributed to the structure of the benthic species, suggesting that the interplay of environmental and spatial factors played a key...

The present study compared crustacean assemblages from coastal wetlands between a fragment archipelago and a landmass. The study included four typical crustacean taxonomic groups (i.e. Cladocera, Copepoda, Ostracoda and Malacostraca) from the Balearic Archipelago region as an example of a fragment island ('Archipelago') and the Catalonia region as...

Metacommunity ecology recognizes the interplay between local and regional patterns in contributing to spatial variation in community structure. In aquatic systems, the relative importance of such patterns depends mainly on the potential connectivity of the specific system. Thus, connectivity is expected to increase in relation to the degree of wate...

Non-metric multidimensional scaling ordination of the 21 study beach sites. a) Environmental resemblance matrix (Euclidean distance calculated from replicate site samples to centroids) and b) Taxa resemblance matrix (Hellinger-transformed and Euclidean distance calculated from replicate site samples to centroids). S: stress. (PDF)

Relationships between the community similarity matrix (Hellinger-transformed and Euclidean distance), environmental distance matrix (Euclidean distance) and distance matrix (nearest site to site distance), respectively. Each dot represents the relationship between 2 of the 21 beach sites and visualizes the relationship between two different distanc...

We tested whether variability in zooplankton assemblages was consistent with the categories of estuarine environments proposed by the ‘Estuary Environment Classification’ system (EEC) (Hume et al., 2007) across a variety of North Island, New Zealand, estuaries. The EEC classifies estuaries in to eight categories (A to F) based primarily on a combin...

Bayesian networks (BNs) are a popular tool in natural resource management but are limited when dealing with ecological assemblage data and when discretizing continuous variables. We present a method that addresses these challenges using a BN model developed for the Upper Murrumbidgee River Catchment (south-eastern Australia). A selection process wa...

Connectivity between ecosystems is of ecological relevance, especially when adjacent areas of contrasting productivity are compared. High-productive rocky shores dominated by macroalgae are one of the most important sources of wrack subsidies linked to low-productive sandy beaches. Rocky bed communities from nearshore environments are affected by s...

The management of freshwater ecosystems is usually targeted through the regulation of water quantity (limiting diversions and providing environmental flows) and regulation of water quality (setting limits or targets for constituent concentrations). Climate change is likely to affect water quantity and quality in multiple ways and the future managem...

Temporal variability is widely acknowledged as a main source of uncertainty and error in ecological studies. Despite this, conservation management tends to overlook the temporal dimension of ecosystems due to financial and operational constraints. The main aim of this study is to identify potential biases in the implementation of the European Water...

Despite the requirements of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) to protect water bodies, suitable indices of quality designed specifically to assess coastal lagoons (transitional waters) remain absent. In the present study, we developed a multimetric index of the Balearic Island based on invertebrate communities (MIBIIN) to assess the ecol...

We tested the hypothesis that structural complexity is an important factor influencing the abundance and taxon richness of microfauna (e.g., rotifers, copepods, cladocerans) in littoral habitats. Research on littoral microfauna has to date focused mainly on field observations, which commonly show microfauna have preference for some macrophytes over...

1 -Coastal lagoons are particular ecosystems, since they are ecotones between terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, being characterized by a high temporal variability. Because of these characteristics, coastal lagoons have very peculiar abiotic and biotic conditions that require investigation if we are to understand their complex ecologica...

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD, 60EC, 2000) requires that a typology be developed at national and European level for the differentiation of ecologically distinct types within water categories. Although common typological descriptors have been defined for stream, lake and coastal areas, a typology for transitional waters has not yet bee...