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Use of Surrogates for the Rapid Assessment of Marine Biodiversity

Euan Harvey, Gary Kendrick, Euan Harvey, Mat Vanderklift and Di Walker

School of Plant Biology (Botany), University of Western Australia, CRAWLEY, AUSTRALIA

Theme: TH4

The selection of sites for marine conservation is often based on biological surveys that aim to assess the biodiversity of potential areas. The problems inherent in measuring biodiversity result in many biological surveys being expensive in terms of both time and money. One way of reducing these costs is to use surrogates to assess biodiversity. The effectiveness of three separate surrogates: habitat information, higher taxonomic levels, and a single assemblage, was tested using data from three marine biological surveys in south-western Australia. Multivariate statistical analyses were used to assess whether each of these three surrogates was able to predict patterns in species composition and diversity reliably in temperate marine areas of south-western Australia. The analyses indicated that: (1) habitat information such as geographic region, substrata, reef relief and depth, could be used to distinguish different patterns in species diversity, as significant differences were found in species compositions from different habitat types, (2) the second surrogate, higher taxonomic levels, was also effective at the levels of genus and family, for predicting patterns in species diversity-at these taxonomic levels most patterns in species diversity were retained; order level was found to be an unreliable surrogate, as many patterns in species diversity were not maintained at this level, especially for fish assemblages, and (3) the use of a single assemblage as a surrogate for patterns in all assemblages was not reliable.