Copepod orders in meiofauna communities of the Fehmarn Belt (Western Baltic Sea) during EMB238 cruise in 2020

DOI

As part of the DAM pilot mission "MGF Ostsee", the meiobenthic communities of a protected area and a reference area in the Fehmarn Belt (Baltic Sea, Germany) were compared, with both study areas currently permitting mobile bottom trawling (MGF). Meiobenthic data were recorded at the major taxon level, with a special focus on the Copepoda Harpacticoida, which was further examined at the species level. This data collection will serve as a baseline for future assessments, after the planned exclusion of MGF in the protected area in 2024 to identify potential impacts of MGF on meiofaunal communities. Meiofauna samples were collected with a multicorer (MUC) on the expedition EMB238 of RV ELISABETH MANN BORGESE from May 26th to June 9th, 2020. From each MUC core the upper 5 cm of the sediment and the supernatant water filtered over 40 µm were used for further processing (area coverage per core: 72.4 cm²). For the morphological approach, this material was fixed with buffered formalin (final concentration: about 4%). Subsequently, in the laboratories of the German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research (DZMB) in Wilhelmshaven, further treatment took place, namely centrifugation of the rinsed samples with Levasil®, a colloidal gel, to separate the organisms from the sediment (cf. McIntyre and Warwick 1984). Because the sampling material contained an extraordinary abundance of meiofauna, each sample had to be divided into sub-samples before counting and sorting the organisms to ensure efficient processing. This was done using the Jensen splitter (Jensen 1982), which divides a sample into eight equally sized sub-samples. One of these was randomly selected and used for further evaluation. For the identification and counting of the individuals, we used Leica DMR and Leica DM 2500 microscopes with interference contrast.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.972910
Related Identifier IsPartOf https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.972922
Related Identifier IsSupplementTo https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4474215/v1
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.972910
Provenance
Creator Packmor, Jana ORCID logo; George, Kai Horst
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2024
Funding Reference Federal Ministry of Education and Research https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002347 Crossref Funder ID 03F0848C https://foerderportal.bund.de/foekat/jsp/SucheAction.do?actionMode=view&fkz=03F0848C DAM sustainMare - MGF Baltic Sea, Senckenberg
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 792 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (10.686W, 54.539S, 10.777E, 54.556N); Baltic Sea
Temporal Coverage Begin 2020-05-27T12:59:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2020-06-03T12:06:00Z