Samples of the bottom fauna have been taken on a grid of 155 stations in the Bristol Channel. The abundance and diversity of species are often used as indicators of "pollution", "disturbance" or "stress" but these traditional indices cannot be used in assessing anthropogenic influences in the Bristol Channel because of the large differences, from region to region, which are caused by differences in tidal stress, particularly in the up-channel regions of strong scour and fluid muds. In summary, it can be said that on the scale of the grid pattern sampled, and using presently available techniques of detecting pollution, all the observed properties of community structure and function are explicable in terms of natural forcing functions, of which current speed is the most important.
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