Data for Brault et al. (2012) Contrasting patterns of α- β-diversity in deep-sea bivalves of the eastern and western North Atlantic. Deep-Sea Research II 92, 157-164

We base the analysis on the deep-sea bivalve faunas of the western North Atlantic (North American Basin south of New England, Fig. 1), and eastern North Atlantic (Rockall Trough, Porcupine Seabight and Abyssal Plain, Fig. 2). The data include all three subclasses of the Bivalvia, the Protobranchia, Lamellibranchia and Septibranchia (the latter now included in the subclass Anomalodesmata). All material was collected with epibenthic sleds (Hessler and Sanders, 1967), as part of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Benthic Sampling Program (Sanders, 1977), or the Joint French and British INCAL 1976 Expedition in the Rockall Trough. Complete data, including stations of the Porcupine Seabight, for localities, species identifications, and relative abundances in samples can be found in Allen (2008). We used Baselga’s (2010) metrics to distinguish two separate components of β-diversity along depth gradients, species dissimilarity among sites due to spatial replacement (turnover) and species loss leading to nestedness, using R package betapart. We also examined the rank order of nestedness with depth using Rodríguez-Gironés and Santamaría’s (2006) BINMATNEST, with R package bipartite.

Allen, J.A., 2008. Bivalvia of the deep Atlantic. Malacologia 50, 57-173.

Baselga, A., 2010. Partitioning the turnover and nestedness components of beta diversity. Global Ecol. Biogeogr. 19, 134-143.

Rodríguez-Gironés, M.A. and Santamaría, L. (2006). A new algorithm to calculate the nestedness temperature of presence–absence matrices. Journal of Biogeography, 33: 924–935.

Hessler, R.R., Sanders, H.L., 1967. Faunal diversity in the deep-sea. Deep-Sea Res. 14, 65-78.

Sanders, H.L., 1977. Evolutionary ecology and the deep-sea benthos. In: Goulden, C.E. (Ed.), The Changing Scenes in Natural Sciences 1776–1976. Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences Special Publication, PH, USA, pp. 223–243.