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You are here: Home / Associated publications / Belgian Journal of Zoology / Bibliographic References / Artificial hard substrata from the Belgian part of the North Sea and their influence on the distributional range of species

Vincent Zintzen and Claude Massin (2010)

Artificial hard substrata from the Belgian part of the North Sea and their influence on the distributional range of species

BELGIAN JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY, 140(1):20-29.

A comprehensive list of the macrospecies recorded on ten shipwrecks from the Belgian Part of the North Sea is presented. The historical records of these species in the area are also reviewed to address the potential role of shipwrecks in providing habitats for species typically associated with hard substrata. The current pooled species richness for Belgian shipwrecks consists of 224 spp., including 12 fish species. Among these species, 46 are new records to the Belgian fauna. Species on shipwrecks fulfil a gap in the regional distribution of sessile and mobile epibenthos. The records of several species are interrupted in the Southern Bight of the North Sea, simply because their habitats, natural hard substrata, are rare in this area and poorly studied. Another consequence of the presence of hard substrata offered by artificial sources is the increase in the distributional range of several species. Due to the presence of artificial substrata, a total of 12 southern species presented an extension of their known geographical range to the North.

Epifauna; shipwreck; North Sea; distribution of species
  • ISSN: 0777-6276
BJZ

ISSN 2295-0451 (online version)
ISSN 0777-6279 (printed version)
impact factor 2015: 0,87.

Editor-in-Chief:
Prof. Dr. Isa Schön
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
Vautierstraat 29
1000 Brussels, Belgium

 



1863-1903
Annales de la Société malacologique de Belgique
 
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​Annales de la Société royale malacologique et zoologique de Belgique
 
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Annales de la Société Royale Zoologique de Belgique
 
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Belgian Journal of Zoology