Variability of soft-bottom macrobenthic invertebrates at different spatial scales: Comparisons between habitats and seasons

Studies focusing on patterns of spatial variation in marine soft-bottom assemblages suggest that variability is mainly concentrated at small spatial scale (from tens of centimeters to few meters), but there is still a lack of knowledge about the consistency of this spatial pattern across habitats and seasons. To address this issue, we quantified the variability in the structure of macrozoobenthic assemblages and in the abundance of dominant macroinvertebrate species in the Mellah Lagoon (Algeria) at three spatial scales, i.e., Plot (meters apart), Station (10's m apart) and Site (kms apart) scale, in Ruppia maritima (Ruppia) beds and unvegetated sediments (Unvegetated), and in two dates in winter and two dates in summer 2016. Spatial variability of the most dominant bivalve Mytilaster marioni varied significantly between habitats, but consistent across the two seasons, with a more heterogeneous distribution in Ruppia than in Unvegetated at the Station scale. Furthermore, a second-order interaction among the hierarchical nature of spatial variability, season and habitat emerged for the assemblage structure. Spatial variability between habitats varied significantly in winter, with the largest variation at the Plot scale in Unvegetated and more heterogenous assemblages at the Plot and Site scales than at the Station scale in Ruppia, but did not vary in summer when most of the variance was at the Site scale. We demonstrate that the scales of influence of the processes operating in the Mellah Lagoon are contingent on the specific habitat and/or period of the year at which the study was conducted, highlighting the importance of examining all these sources of variation simultaneously to increase the accuracy of explanatory models derived from the observed patterns in sedimentary environments.