Abstract
Biogeographical partitioning of ecological communities has been renewed
in recent decades to illustrate broad distributional patterns. In the
oceans, observational datasets have grown substantially and open new
access to test bioregional patterns beyond the classical fixed
thresholds of endemism to differentiate regions. This work combines a
recently collated dataset of 29 different scientific bottom trawl
surveys spanning 21 years with network-based clustering to illustrate
biogeographical partitions of vast tracts of the northern hemisphere’s
continental shelf seas. Our work contributes to testing
bioregionalization patterns in demersal fishes using observational data,
totaling >2.5 million species records and >2000
species, with bipartite network clustering weighted by species
occurrence frequencies. We propose eight major bioregions across shelf
seas which fall along the longest geographical axis in each shelf region
and against continua of species richness gradients, endemicity, and
phylogenetic turnover rates. These patterns capture known
biogeographical boundaries (e.g., North Sea–Baltic Sea, Cape Hatteras)
alongside potential transition areas deduced from uncertainty estimates
based on shared network nodes between bioregions. The most species-rich
areas include the Southeast US Shelf, Temperate Pacific, Northeast
Atlantic Shelf, and the Outer European Shelf— corresponding to
relatively high endemicity. However, the relatively species-poor
partitions including the Baltic Sea and the North & Celtic Seas display
comparatively low endemicity (<8%), illustrating apparent
statistical differences in partitions captured by bipartite networks and
occurrence frequencies that would otherwise be missed using a fixed
endemic criterion. Our proposed bioregionalization can be compared
against the growing availability of species occurrence data, dispersal
limitations, or other quantitative observations of ecological
communities.