Groundfish assemblages diversity in upwelling ecosystems: insights from the Mauritanian Exclusive Economic Zone

Upwelling ecosystems exhibit strong spatio-temporal variations of environmental conditions that drive the dynamics of marine diversity and ressources. Yet little is known in these ecosystems concerning the diversity of groundfishes. We studied the effects of environment (sea surface temperature, chlorophyll a concentration and bathymetric strata) and fishing pressure on this variability in the Mauritanian Exclusive Economic Zone (MEEZ), based on abundance data collected from 2158 hauls from scientific surveys performed on the continental shelf (15–200 m) between 1997 and 2010. First, for each haul (i.e. alpha-diversity), Species richness S and Berger Parker dominance D_bp were used as proxies of two complementary groups of nine indices, belonging to three main components of diversity (species number, evenness and taxonomic diversity), identified by a principal component analysis based on Spearman correlation coefficient. Thus the set of diversity indices used in this work suggests that a single component of diversity cannot represent the biodiversity of MEEZ groundfish. Second, generalized linear models (GLM) highlighted the stability of both indices for environmental variables, fishing effort and time, while, as shown by a previous study in the MEEZ, these variables influence species composition (i.e. beta-diversity). A longitudinal gradient of S and D_bp was highlighted, with coastal strata being richer in species and abundances more evenly distributed among species than offshore strata. Overall, this study provides a baseline of groundfish diversity in the MEEZ, that is also useful for comparison to other upwelling ecosystems, and essential for monitoring its potential shifts faced to climate change.