REGIONAL-SCALE VARIABILITY OF MACROFAUNA SPECIES ASSEMBLAGES AND ENVIRONMENTAL DRIVERS IN THE CANADIAN BEAUFORT SEA

Appropriate marine spatial planning is needed to address pressures associated with climate change, resource exploration and increased shipping in the Canadian Beaufort Sea. Information regarding the spatial variability of species assemblages and the factors that structure them are required, for example, in designing networks of marine protected areas and establishing reference conditions for assessing anthropogenic activities anticipated to have regional-scale effects. Benthic macrofauna have been widely applied as ecological indicators in many marine regions because they are relatively sessile, long-lived, and respond to environmental gradients in a predictable manner. Recently, significant progress has been made toward reporting Arctic macrofaunal biodiversity baselines across large spatial scales (i.e. pan-Arctic, Canadian Arctic) and at local-scales within the Beaufort Sea around specific geographic features (e.g., Beaufort Shelf, polynyas and areas of upwelling, lease blocks). Systematic, regional-scale surveys, however, remain a gap. Benthic ecosystem components were sampled across a broad depth range (20 – 1500m) from the transboundary region of the Yukon-Alaska border into Amundsen Gulf, and multivariate analyses of these novel survey data characterize spatial variability in macrobenthic community structure. Relationships between species assemblages and environmental drivers including depth, bottom type (e.g., granulometry), water mass characteristics (e.g., temperature, salinity) and benthic food proxies (e.g., %organic matter, benthic chlorophyll concentration) were examined. This regional-scale approach based on a systematic, transect-based survey design covers a significant portion of the Canadian Beaufort Sea and expands existing biodiversity baselines to deeper sites beyond the continental shelf break. This work has direct application to developing predictive models, habitat maps and biotic indicators for monitoring.