Walsh and Guida: Fish and macro-invertebrate assemblages near wind energy areas 
445 
Brachyura 
o 
• RIMA-MA 
0 NY 
o NJ 
O VA 
V 
O 
Pelagic fish 
Demersal fish 
Crustacea 
Mollusca 
Echinodermata 
Polychaeta 
Porifera 
Ctenophora 
0 1 2 
CA1 (16.0%) 
Figure 4 
(A) Correspondence analysis ordination plots, showing the scores and variance 
explained for the first and second dimensions (CA1 and CA2), of the sampling 
stations at 4 wind energy areas, Rhode Island-Massachusetts and Massachu¬ 
setts (RIMA-MA), New York (NY), New Jersey (NJ), and Virginia (VA) by using 
fish and macro-invertebrate taxa that occurred in at least 10% of the collections 
made by beam trawl in 2014. The size of the symbols are scaled to the contribu¬ 
tion of each taxon to the ordination and are shown by taxon classification for 
(B) average proportion of a taxon per station and (C) average individual weight 
of a taxon per station. Taxa that contributed more than 1% to the ordination are 
labeled (For names of taxa, see Table 2). 
Environmental relationships 
Environmental variables were related to the station 
groups and associated fish and macro-invertebrate as¬ 
semblages for both beam and bottom trawls. Forward 
selection of the explanatory environmental variables 
indicated bottom salinity was not significantly related 
to the assemblages sampled by either gear and was 
removed from the analyses. The 5 remaining environ¬ 
mental variables, which differed among gears used for 
sampling, resulted in the first 2 CCA dimensions sig¬ 
nificantly aligning with the station groups (Fig. 6). The 
unconstrained variance explained the most variability 
of each ordination, 75.8% and 56.0% for the beam and 
bottom trawls, respectively. The environmental vari¬ 
ables explained 20.5% of the variation for the beam 
