资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Habitat heterogeneity and species diversity are often linked. On the deep seafloor, sediment variability and hard-substrate avail- ability influence geographic patterns of species richness and turn- over. The assumption of a generally homogeneous, sedimented abyssal seafloor is at odds with the fact that the faunal diversity in some abyssal regions exceeds that of shallow-water environ- ments. Here we show, using a ground-truthed analysis of multi- beam sonar data, that the deep seafloor may be much rockier than previously assumed. A combination of bathymetry data, rugged- ness, and backscatter from a trans-Atlantic corridor along the Vema Fracture Zone, covering crustal ages from 0 to 100 Ma, show rock exposures occurring at all crustal ages. Extrapolating to the whole Atlantic, over 260,000 km(2) of rock habitats potentially occur along Atlantic fracture zones alone, significantly increasing our knowledge about abyssal habitat heterogeneity. This implies that sampling cam- paigns need to be considerably more sophisticated than at present to capture the full deep-sea habitat heterogeneity and biodiversity.