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Meiofauna Abundance And Distribution In Chesapeake Bay: Relationships With Environmental Stressors, Sediment Toxicity And Macrofauna, William J. Metcalfe

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Macrofauna-based biocriteria to assess impairment in aquatic communities are well-developed and have been widely accepted as useful for coastal monitoring programs worldwide. Meiofauna-based methods are not as well developed, but meiofauna are intimately associated with sediments through their life cycles and are functionally important. Thus, an understanding of meiofauna relationships with environmental quality is also important. Relationships between the abundance and composition of major meiofauna taxa for two shallow water habitat types (protected, with muddy sediment; exposed, with sandy sediment) were investigated along gradients associated with changing land use, sediment contamination and environmental stressors in Chesapeake Bay. Principal component analysis …