# Taxonomic distinctness and diversity patterns of a polychaete (Annelida) community on the continental shelf of the Southern Gulf of Mexico

## TL;DR

This study explores how annelid polychaete species diversity varies across the Southern Gulf of Mexico's continental shelf and identifies factors influencing these patterns.

## Contribution

The study introduces taxonomic distinctness as a measure to explore spatial diversity patterns and faunal assemblages in polychaete communities.

## Key findings

- Three distinct faunal assemblages were identified using taxonomic distinctness and clustering.
- Richness and taxonomic distinctness varied spatially across the Southern Gulf of Mexico.
- Spatial processes and sediment characteristics together explained more variance in polychaete distribution than either alone.

## Abstract

The spatial patterns of taxonomic diversity of annelid polychaete species from the continental shelf in the Southern Gulf of Mexico were examined in this study. We used taxonomic distinctness and its spatial variations to explore the diversity patterns and how they change between Southern Gulf of Mexico regions. In addition, using taxonomic distinctness as a dissimilarity measure and Ward’s Clustering, we characterized three distinct faunal assemblages. We also investigated patterns of richness, taxonomic distinctness, and distance decay of similarity between sampling stations as a ß-diversity measure. Finally, we examined the spatial relationships between polychaete assemblages and environmental variables to test the relative importance of spatial and environmental components in annelid polychaete community structure from the Southern Gulf of Mexico. We used a combination of eigenvector-based multivariate analyses (dbMEMs) and distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA) to quantify the relative importance of these explanatory variables on the spatial variations of taxonomic distinctness. The significance level of spatial and environmental components to the distribution of polychaete species showed that the combined effect of spatial processes and sediment characteristics explained a higher percentage of the variance than those parameters could alone.