Identifying biotic drivers of population dynamics in a benthic–pelagic community

Benthic species and communities are linked to pelagic zooplankton through life-stages encompassing both benthic and pelagic habitats and through a mutual dependency on primary producers as a food source. Many zooplankton taxa contribute to the sedimentary system as benthic eggs. Our main aim was to investigate the nature of the population level biotic interactions between and within these two seemingly independent communities, both dependent on the pelagic primary production, while simultaneously accounting for environmental drivers (salinity, temperature and oxygen conditions). To this end we applied multivariate autoregressive state-space models to long (1966–2007) time-series of annual abundance data, comparing models with and without interspecific interactions, as well as models with and without environmental variables included. We were not able to detect any direct coupling between sediment-dwelling benthic taxa and pelagic copepods and cladocerans on the annual scale, but the most...