Landscape fine-scale complexity of seagrass, fish and macroinvertebrate communities within Artificial Seagrass Units (ASU) in Back Sound, NC from July to September 2018

To parse the ecological effects of habitat area and patchiness on faunal community structure and dynamics of estuarine nekton, we employed artificial seagrass unit (ASU) landscapes at a scale relevant to habitat fidelity of common fish and macroinvertebrates (days to weeks) in this temperate study system. We designed and deployed 25 unique, 234-meter squared (m2) landscapes, composed of a total of 2059 1-meter squared ASUs. These landscapes were designed along orthogonal axes of artificial seagrass area (i.e., percent cover of each landscape = 10-60 percent) and fragmentation per se (i.e., percolation probability; 0.1-0.59) to delineate their independent and interactive effects on seagrass fish and macroinvertebrate communities. We were also interested in the relative importance of landscape parameters versus fine-scale complexity metrics (i.e., artificial seagrass canopy height, epiphyte biomass) in influencing faunal density patterns within structured seagrass. Therefore, in July and September 2018, fine-scale habitat complexity metrics, including ASU canopy height and epiphyte biomass, were sampled along a transect from the edge to the center of the largest patch in each landscape. Fine-scale complexity samples were collected by Drs. F. Joel Fodrie and Amy H. Yarnall for the Estuarine Ecology Laboratory of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences.