Journal of Marine Science: Research & Development
Open Access

Abstract

The quantitative assessment of benthic community in Buyat Bay, North Sulawesi has been conducted in order to measure the impacts of submarine tailing placement (STP) during 8 years gold mining operation (1996-2004) in the bay. The monitoring has been conducted twice a year (May and September) from 2009 to 2014. Quantitative benthic macrofauna samples were collected with a grab samples from the STP areas, coastal and reference stations. The substantial natural variation in abundance (326-7849 inds/ m2) and number of taxa (21-87) among five stations in tailing placement areas were comparable to the coastal and reference stations, and were mostly higher than the baseline data in 1993 where the abundance and number of taxa were reported in range of 880-5360 inds/m2 and 20-56, respectively. At all stations species diversity ranged from 2.5 to 5.8, with similar annual seasonal trend, where the population was more abundant in September than that in May, and mainly polychaetes and crustaceans. This trend is presumably triggered by the reproduction period in September, and the recruitment period in May. This assessment reveals that Buyat Bay is a suitable environment for the establishment of benthic macrofauna and the tailing placement areas have been sustainably inhabitied by the macrobenthic community.

Biography

Inneke F M Rumengan has completed her PhD from Nagasaki University Japan. She is the Director of Research and Community Services Institution, Sam Ratulangi University, Manado, Indonesia and was a visiting researcher at University of Tokyo, Japan. She has published more than 20 papers in reputed journals and has been involved as a member of Independent Scientific Panel for Monitoring of Buyat Bay Environment (2006-2016). She has been serving as an Editorial Board Member of scientific journals.

Email: innekerumengan@unsrat.ac.id