Abstract
Fish assemblages along marine artificial reefs have been the objects of numerous studies. Most of them distinguish resident from transient species according to their habitat association level. Despite its wide use, this distinction presents practical complications for two main reasons: first, the method used for assessing habitat association level may cause mistakes, and second, no objective method has been proposed thus far to determine the habitat association level that should be considered as a boundary between resident and transient species. This paper aims at overcoming these two problems. In order to improve and standardize assessment of habitat association level, we developed a habitat association index (HAI) whose calculation requires only presence-absence data. By taking into account both species occurrence rate and occurrence patterns, our index minimizes the risk of erroneously perceiving species as being equally associated to a habitat. In order to distinguish between resident and transient species objectively, we propose to plot HAI against occurrence rate and then seek the combination providing the most significantly different groups with reference to the relation between these two variables. Using two different datasets collected along Japanese artificial reefs and comparing the results with the ones obtained through an alternate method consisting of plotting persistence against maximum abundance and looking for a major gap along the persistence axis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this two-step method.
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Abbreviations
- HAI:
-
Habitat Association Index
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Boisnier, E., Sagawa, T., Komatsu, T. et al. A habitat association index to distinguish resident species along marine artificial reefs. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 10, 165–172 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.10.2009.2.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.10.2009.2.5