Role of geoenvironmental conditions in diverse benthos activity and the ecohabitat chart based on ecological geotechnics

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By utilizing our new approach in Ecological Geotechnics, we performed a comprehensive set of field observations and surveys as well as six series of controlled laboratory experiments of benthos-soil systems in order to investigate the responses of six species of invertebrates that belonged to Arthropoda, Mollusca, and Annelida to the varying geoenvironments as manifested in the field. The results of the experiments revealed that for each of the burrowing activities, there exist optimal, transitional and critical geoenvironmental conditions, which are found to differ considerably between species, body sizes and weights. On the basis of these results, we have constructed an ecohabitat chart which enables an interspecific comparison of the burrowing performances and capabilities of the diverse benthic fauna in light of the associated geoenvironments in the field. The observed distributions of diverse benthos at various natural and artificial intertidal flats are found to be well consistent with the ecohabitat chart developed in this study.