Eight decades of sampling reveal a contemporary novel fish assemblage in coastal nursery habitats.

In order to adequately monitor biodiversity trends through time and their responses to natural or anthropogenic impacts, researchers require long time series that are often unavailable. This general lack of datasets that are several decades or longer makes establishing a background or baseline of diversity metrics difficult - especially when attempting to understand species composition changes against a backdrop of climate and ecological variability. Here, we present an analysis of a community of juvenile nearshore fishes based on nearly 8 decades of highly standardized Norwegian survey records. Using multivariate statistical techniques, we: (i) characterize the change in taxonomic communit…