Megabenthos Indicators


Benthic macroinvertebrate communities are diverse and very good indicators of environmental status. Researchers/students will test the influence of environmental and anthropogenic stressors on benthic communities by relating stressor layers to benthic assemblage data for both regions. Indicators of ecosystem condition will be developed based on existing indicators that will be adapted for Canadian waters.

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Project Deliverables / Achievements

  • A preliminary version of a web application to visualize the spatial distribution and intensity of stressors in the St. Lawrence. It is a crowd-science initiative and creating an open-data multi-stressors platform.

  • Spatially explicit map of cumulative stressors for the Gulf of St. Lawrence to guide discussions among management agencies and stakeholders to quantify and manage cumulative impacts in the area is in progress.

  • Large-scale spatial models of species and community characteristics (e.g. diversity, biomass, assemblages etc.) for the GSL and SoG are completed.

  • Integrated models of community distribution (Hierarchical Modelling of Species Community) are completed from DFO annual trawl survey data.

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Gulf of St. Lawrence

Strait of Georgia