Towards time and cost‐efficient habitat assessment: Challenges and opportunities for benthic ecology and management

Abstract

Abstract To the untrained eye, soft‐sediment habitats are often viewed as vast expanses of featureless sand and mud. With new technology, it is finally possible to begin to map the ecological heterogeneity of these ecosystems to reveal their importance for ecosystem service provision and open up new opportunities to manage their use and protect them. When compared with terrestrial or marine vegetated habitats, the characterization of unvegetated soft sediments still lacks rapid and cost‐effective practices that allow the direct collection of ecological data at multiple spatial and temporal scales facilitating direct relevance to conservation and management. New technologies that allow for the building of maps that incorporate multiple scales of heterogeneity also provide new ways of upscaling necessarily detailed and small‐scale process studies. The study of the relationship between benthic structure, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning can benefit from a range of established and novel techniques and creates new opportunities to empirically test generalities and predictions based on theory or small‐scale experimental studies. The capacity to map ecological changes rapidly and at scale and to link small‐scale experiments to landscapes uncovers new insights for seafloor conservation including rapid response to disturbance events, broad‐scale ecologically meaningful mapping and assessments of biodiversity–ecosystem function and biodiversity–ecosystem services relationships. As technology advances and becomes more accessible to all, it offers promising new avenues of research to expand our current capabilities, and the adoption of nested approaches, with a synergy of different samplings simultaneously covering several scales and resolutions, is likely to have the most benefit, supporting decision‐making with ecologically insightful data, as well as the timely assessment of the outcomes of conservation actions.