Examples of long-term disturbances are the rise in ocean temperatures or ocean acidification ( National Research Council, 2013). In the context of our oceans, such disturbances can be temporary, such as oil spills, dredging operations, or algal blooms due to mismanaged waste waters. In contrast, ecological resilience acknowledges that there may be multiple steady-states in a system when conditions change, and the difficulty of returning to the original state may be unachievable if the disturbance is too large ( Gunderson, 2002). The major difference in viewpoint is that in engineering resilience, an ecosystem is assumed to have only one equilibrium point that it will return to after a disturbance ( Holling, 1996). There are two general notions of resilience, namely engineering and ecological resilience. To aid this search and catalog biodiversity, genetic analyses are of high importance, and the development of cheaper and faster sequencing methods is a great advantage.īiodiversity is a factor in another concept that is highly debated-resilience. A renewed interest and more funding availability would help to fill the gaps in our knowledge toward the very fundamentals of life on Earth ( Mora et al., 2011). Unfortunately, taxonomic studies are difficult to fund and experts are crucial in identifying organisms to species level, which in turn means that fewer species are being described currently. Accumulation curves can also be constructed for samples in a certain habitat after examining a certain number of samples, as shown in Figure 1. When this curve flattens for considerable periods of time, it suggests that a high percentage of species in the habitat or level of biological organization have been found. Species accumulation curves allow the number of species still to be discovered in a certain habitat to be estimated, using the number of species of a certain phylum or group described over the last centuries ( Bebber et al., 2007 Mora et al., 2008). ![]() The increasing threats to our oceans, however, are likely to drive many species to extinction before we can catalog them and learn about their habits, life cycle and, most importantly, their role in the ecosystem. (2011) estimated the number of species found in the oceans to be around 2.2 million, with over 90% still undescribed. A more surprising habitat that is highly diverse is the deep sea, upon which this review will focus. In the marine realm, there are a several hotspots of biodiversity that are widely accepted, such as mangrove forests or coral reefs. Generally, higher genetic diversity in a population is beneficial, as populations are able to withstand a broader range of environmental conditions and are more resilient to changes within ecosystems ( Gray, 1997 Des Roches et al., 2018). Using genetics and taxonomy, diversity can be measured between individuals and their populations, which can provide important information on, for example, life history stages and migration. There is little hope for areas in which exploitation, such as deep-sea mining, will be directly impacting the benthos and proper regulations are required to preserve biodiversity in the deep sea.īiodiversity describes the variety of organisms living in a certain habitat and can be analyzed within and between species. It remains uncertain whether the deep sea is resilient toward anthropogenic disturbances, yet this is difficult to research on short timescales. Many mysteries persist in the deep sea, but it is certain that threats such as overfishing, plastic pollution, and changes in ocean chemistry due to climate change are impacting even the most remote places in the oceans. Unfortunately, this diversity is threatened by human impact similarly to shallow waters, and future endeavors such as deep-sea mineral extraction must be considered as a major threat to the environment. In addition, the different environments in which biodiversity is studied are presented, and the various hypotheses on how high biodiversity is possible are examined. In this review, the different methodologies used to examine biodiversity in the remote depths of the oceans are considered. ![]() With a multitude of different environments and conditions previously thought to be inhabitable, it is unclear how such high diversity was able to develop, but habitat heterogeneity and nutrient flux are certainly important factors to consider. The deep sea is the most extensive habitat on our planet, and it supports surprisingly high biodiversity.
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