Meeting Abstract
Alterations to coastal ecosystems require researchers to formulate ecological baselines for comparison studies to identify the effects, if any, to nearshore communities. As the Florida coast is tested with beach replenishment, sea level change, global warming, and human population growth, establishing and monitoring baselines will allow effects of alterations to be elucidated. Hence, benthic cores collected quarterly from locations along Florida’s southeastern coast from May 2015 to February 2016 using a 7.7-cm PVC corer to examine macroinfaunal abundance, composition, and diversity, as well as sediment characteristics (e.g., composition and sphericity). The results suggest median grain size is negatively correlated with infaunal abundance, diversity, and species richness, and an increase in species diversity indices and infaunal abundance as distance to the Equator decreases. The middle sites of the study, located closer to the Florida Current, tended to contain higher percentages of carbonate and median grain size than the southernmost and northernmost sites. Polychaetous annelids (mainly Armandia agilis and Paraonis fulgens ), mysid shrimp (Chlamydopleon dissimile ), isopods (Euryidice piperata and Ancinus depressus ), and amphipods (Bathyporeia parkeri ) dominated a majority of the sites across all months. This study supports the idea of resilient infaunal communities as the results suggest no long term effects with regards to temporal proximity of beach replenishments. The results of this study provide a baseline for macroinfaunal composition and sediment characters for future studies along Florida’s southeastern coast.
