Global warming causes profound environmental shifts in the Arctic Ocean, altering the composition and structure of communities. In the Fram Strait, a transitional zone between the North-Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, climate change effects are particularly pronounced and accelerated due to an increased inflow of warm Atlantic water. Gelatinous zooplankton are known as key predators, consuming a great variety of prey and playing an...

Aim We conduct the first model‐based assessment of the biogeographical subdivision of Eurasian Arctic seas to (1) delineate spatial distribution and boundaries of macrobenthic communities on a seascape level; (2) assess the significance of environmental drivers of macrobenthic community structures; (3) compare our modelling results to historical biogeographical classifications; and (4) couple the model to climate scenarios of...

In times of accelerating climate change, species are challenged to respond to rapidly shifting environmental settings. Yet, faunal distribution and composition are still scarcely known for remote and little explored seas, where observations are limited in number and mostly refer to local scales. Here, we present the first comprehensive study on Eurasian-Arctic macrobenthos that aims to unravel the relative influence of distinc...

Multiple environmental factors control benthic community patterns, and their relative importance varies with spatial scale. Since this variation is difficult to evaluate quantitatively, extensive sampling across a broad range of spatial scales is required. Here, we present a first case study on Southern Ocean shelf benthos, in which mega‐epibenthic communities and biota‐environment relationships have been explored at multiple...

Aim Recent studies increasingly use statistical methods to infer biotic interactions from co‐occurrence information at a large spatial scale. However, disentangling biotic interactions from other factors that can affect co‐occurrence patterns at the macroscale is a major challenge. Approach We present a set of questions that analysts and reviewers should ask to avoid erroneously attributing species association patterns to biot...

Thresholds profoundly affect our understanding and management of ecosystem dynamics, but we have yet to develop practical techniques to assess the risk that thresholds will be crossed. Combining ecological knowledge of critical system interdependencies with a large‐scale experiment, we tested for breaks in the ecosystem interaction network to identify threshold potential in real‐world ecosystem dynamics. Our experiment with th...

Aim Species distribution models ( SDM s) are common tools in biogeography and conservation ecology. It has been repeatedly claimed that aggregated (stacked) SDM s ( S ‐ SDM s) will overestimate species richness. One recently suggested solution to this problem is to use macroecological models of species richness to constrain S ‐ SDM s. Here, we examine current practice in the development of S ‐ SDM s to identify methodological...

Ongoing statistical sophistication allows a shift from describing species' spatial distributions toward statistically disentangling the possible roles of environmental variables in shaping species distributions. Based on a landscape‐scale benthic survey in the Dutch Wadden Sea, we show the merits of spatially explicit generalized estimating equations (GEE). The intertidal macrozoobenthic species, Macoma balthica , Cerastoderma...