Duration: 29/9-2025 – 28/9-2028

Quantifying spatial patterns of deep-sea biological communities will increase our understanding of important ecological processes and enable us to better map and manage the ocean. 

The deep-sea benthos (sea bottom) contains crucial ecosystems which contribute with services and functions that are fundamental to society, including climate regulation through capturing and storing of carbon, regulating nutrient cycling, and providing unique habitats essential for many species - some of commercial interest.

Despite their importance, deep-sea benthic ecosystems are subject to a range of human activities that directly or indirectly impact them, such as pollution, climate change, bottom trawling, oil and gas extraction, dredging and deep-sea mining. Concurrently, the deep-sea benthos remains one of the least studied ecosystems on earth, in part due to the challenges associated with reaching it. 

Therefore, we urgently need better information for assessing the risk for marine benthic biodiversity of planned human activities, as well as guidelines to help us better map and monitor these systems. Fulfilling these needs requires a comprehensive understanding of how biological communities change with distance of separation– their spatial scaling. This is of great importance because their spatial scaling has implications for our basic understanding of marine ecosystems, the spatial sampling design needed to map biodiversity, and for how species respond to changes in their environment. Likewise, the impact of human activities on biodiversity depends on the spatial patterns of biological
communities and how they relate to the spatial extent of the disturbances.

The overarching goal of this project is to uncover spatial patterns of deep-sea benthic communities and to understand more about how these spatial patterns relate to those of anthropogenic activities. We will do this in three parts:

1. Quantify spatial scaling and patterns of Norwegian deep-sea benthic communities in relation to their environment
2. Use this new knowledge to develop data sampling guidelines for different groups of marine organisms
3. Relate the spatial scaling of these communities to the spatial scaling of ongoing and planned anthropogenic activities to build the foundations of a comprehensive risk assessment of human impacts on the communities

The findings will enhance our understanding of the important biological communities in the deep sea and facilitate informed decision making within management, protection, marine spatial planning and future mapping of deep-sea ecosystems - constituting a vital step towards an ecosystem-based management of the ocean.  

This project is a collaboration with the Institute of Marine Research and is funded by the NTNU Ocean and Coast Strategic Research Area.