Database for Stuart et al. (to be submitted to Journal of Biogeography). Nestedness and species replacement along bathymetric gradients in the deep sea reflect productivity: a test with polychaete assemblages in the oligotrophic NW Gulf of Mexico.

This study focuses on the two most western sampling transects (Fig. 1) of the Deep Gulf of Mexico Benthos (DGoMB) Study in the northern Gulf (Rowe & Kennicutt, 2008; Wei et al., 2010). The transects include 13 sampling stations extending from 213 to 3146 m across the bathyal zone, and 3 deeper stations off the continental margin at 3526-3732 m. Samples were collected with a 0.20 m2 box corer, and sieved on a 300μm screen. The fauna analyzed here is the polychaete worm fraction of the samples.

We used Baselga’s (2010, 2012) β-diversity metrics to assess the relative importance of turnover and nestedness; the R package Betapart was used. We used BINMATNEST (Rodríguez-Gironés & Santamaría, 2006) to determine the nested rank order of sampling stations with depth and POC flux; the R package Bipartite was used.

Baselga, A. (2010) Partitioning the turnover and nestedness components of beta diversity. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 19, 134-143.

Baselga, A. (2012) The relationship between species replacement, dissimilarity derived from nestedness, and nestedness. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 21, 1223-1232.

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

Rowe, G.T. & Kennicutt, M.C. (2008) Introduction to the Deep Gulf of Mexico Benthos Program. Deep Sea Research II, 55, 2536–2540.

Wei, C., Rowe, G.T., Hubbard, G.F., Scheltema, A.H., Wilson, G.D.F., Petrescu, I., Foster, J. M., Wicksten, M. K., Chen, M., Davenport, R., Soliman, Y. & Wang, Y. (2010) Bathymetric zonation of deep-sea macrofauna in relation to export of surface phytoplankton production. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 399, 1-14.