TY - JOUR

T1 - Oil platforms in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf: Living and death assemblages reveal no effects

AU - Albano, Paolo G.

AU - Filippova, Nadezhda

AU - Steger, Jan

AU - Kaufman, Darrell S.

AU - Toma ov ch, Adam

AU - Stachowitsch, Michael

AU - Zuschin, Martin

PY - 2016

Y1 - 2016

N2 - Environmental impact assessments require pre-impact data to discriminate between natural and anthropogenic sources of community shifts. True pre-impact data, however, are rarely available because the onset of ocean biomonitoring in the 20th century frequently postdates the timing of such shifts. Death assemblages (DAs) sampled on a sea-floor capture previous community states and represent archives of past preimpact conditions. This is because they change more slowly (10–10,000 years) than the corresponding living assemblage (LA) (yearly scales of turnover). Strong and rapid directional changes such as those due to human activities are therefore not immediately captured by DAs, leading to a greater live-dead (LD) mismatch than under natural processes alone. We used this approach to infer disturbance of benthic habitats around platforms in two major oilfields in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf: Umm Al Dalkh (UA) and Zakum (ZK). We found that, first, LD metrics showed no correlation with contamination levels or dista

AB - Environmental impact assessments require pre-impact data to discriminate between natural and anthropogenic sources of community shifts. True pre-impact data, however, are rarely available because the onset of ocean biomonitoring in the 20th century frequently postdates the timing of such shifts. Death assemblages (DAs) sampled on a sea-floor capture previous community states and represent archives of past preimpact conditions. This is because they change more slowly (10–10,000 years) than the corresponding living assemblage (LA) (yearly scales of turnover). Strong and rapid directional changes such as those due to human activities are therefore not immediately captured by DAs, leading to a greater live-dead (LD) mismatch than under natural processes alone. We used this approach to infer disturbance of benthic habitats around platforms in two major oilfields in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf: Umm Al Dalkh (UA) and Zakum (ZK). We found that, first, LD metrics showed no correlation with contamination levels or dista

KW - Persian (Arabian) Gulf

KW - Offshore structures

KW - Mollusca

KW - Live-dead fidelity

KW - Oil pollution

U2 - 10.1016/j.csr.2015.12.007

DO - 10.1016/j.csr.2015.12.007

M3 - Article

VL - 121

SP - 21

EP - 34

JO - Continental Shelf Research

JF - Continental Shelf Research

SN - 0278-4343

ER -