Antonina Badalucco‡§, Sabrina Lo Brutto‡§, Jean-Claude Dauvin|, Mark John Costello¶Corresponding author: Sabrina Lo Brutto ( sabrina.lobrutto@unipa.it ) Corresponding author: Mark John Costello ( mark.j.costello@nord.no ) © Antonina Badalucco, Sabrina Lo Brutto, Jean-Claude Dauvin, Mark John Costello. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
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We classified European and adjacent seas into nine biogeographic realms and provinces (bioregions) based on a new compilation of over 17,000 records of the distribution of 1,182 native species of Amphipoda (Crustacea) at a spatial resolution of 4° latitude longitude. The dominant, characterising, and percent of unique species (endemicity) for each realm are reported. In order of distinctiveness and endemicity the bioregions were the Mid-North Atlantic (53 %), Black Sea freshwater (35 %), Mediterranean and Black Sea marine (32 %), Canary Islands and Cape Verde (21 %), North-West coast of Africa (14 %), North-East Atlantic shelf (12 %), coastal Norwegian Sea (9 %), Azores (9 %) and Baltic Sea (6 %). A hierarchical cluster analysis suggested these may be grouped into realms and provinces. Records filling geographic gaps, and comparable studies on additional taxa, will improve this biogeographic analysis. Meanwhile, the planning of Marine Protected Areas needs to include areas within each of these bioregions to be inclusive of all species in the study area.