Benthic fish and invertebrate assemblages within the National Marine Fisheries Service US west coast triennial bottom trawl survey

This project sought to derive the ecological boundaries within a bottom trawl survey by treating benthic fish and invertebrate species as biological indicators in assemblage analyses. A secondary goal was to determine if these ecological boundaries match the strata boundaries of the bottom trawl survey. Most fishery-independent bottom trawl surveys are driven by management needs for relative biomass estimation of commercial stocks within certain strata, and the strata boundaries are often abiotic features such as political borders, capes and submarine canyons, or arbitrary depths. However, these surveys also generate a great deal of under-utilized data—such as the abundance of non-commercial benthic species and the occurrence of size-groups of commercial species—that can be used for defining ecological boundaries that are independent of the strata boundaries. For an example data set, this analysis used the National Marine Fisheries Service US west coast bottom trawl survey, which has sampled the same 610 stations in three surveys (1995, 1998, and 2001). This analysis determined the geographic extent of three biologically distinct assemblages which occurred in a total of 9 analyses across three bottom trawl surveys and across three assemblage analysis methods: hierarchical clustering, detrended correspondence analysis (DCA), and non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS). Most trawl survey stations were consistently grouped into the same assemblage in a majority of the 9 analyses, indicating that the assemblages were stable with respect to time and to interpretation from the different assemblage analyses. Kriging on the percent agreement of the 9 analyses at each station defined boundaries of agreement (edges of assemblages), areas of disagreement (transition zones between assemblages), and clear differences from the arbitrary latitude/depth bottom trawl survey stratification scheme. The temporal and statistical consistency, and the geographical continuity of the assemblages, along with significant differences in depth and bottom water temperature among assemblages, indicated the utility of using benthic species for deriving the number and geographic extent of ecological boundaries within the bottom trawl survey area.