Etude critique des methodes d'estimation de la production secondaire macrobenthique marine.

摘要

The determination of secondary production, while important in population dynamics and energy flux studies, remains difficult for benthic ecologists. Production studies require expensive and time-consuming sampling programs and unbiased methods. To evaluate marine macrobenthic production, both from a methodological and an ecological viewpoint, an exhaustive review of fifteen major marine ecology journals, 1970 trough 1999 inclusively, was carried out. 147 production studies which giving a total of 547 estimates were used to examine global patterns of marine benthic macroinvertebrate production and their distribution among functional guilds, taxonomic guilds and various habitats. This study allowed us to built new empirical models for various marine habitats. It showed that biotic variables (notably maximum life span and mean body mass) were more important than environmental variables in explaining observed variations in production values and production to biomass (PB) ratios. The abiotic variables (water depth and temperature) did not greatly improve the predictability from biotic variables. A detailed analysis of the methods used to assess production showed a number of sources of errors, omissions or unclear descriptions of methods which may lead to erroneous production estimations. This meta-analysis also showed the large number of methods used to assess production and empirical difference (bias and precision) of the main methods. Simulations were carried out, using an artificial blue mussel population (i.e. Mytilus spp.), to explore the statistical properties, the mathematical bias and precision among main methods, using various sampling designs (sampling frequency, number of samples per date, sieve aperture etc). Finally, we used an intertidal subarctic mussel population to evaluate some of the problems encountered in calculating and interpreting productions when working with populations in an unsteady state. We also examined the meaning of a negative net production as an indicator of the state of a population and discuss the use of the actual production and the potential production (assuming steady state) in interpreting such unsteady state populations.