Pollutants alter marine systems, interfering with provisioning of ecosystem services; understanding their interaction with ecological communities is therefore critical to inform environmental management. Here we propose a joint interaction- and compositional-based analysis for ecological status assessment and apply it on the benthic communities of the Bagnoli Bay. We found that contamination differentially affects the communities’ composition in the bay, with prokaryotes influenced only by depth, and benthos not following the environmental gradient at all. This result is confirmed by analyses of the community structure, whose network architecture suggest fast carbon flow and cycling, especially by nematodes and polychaetes; the benthic prey/predator biomass ratio, adjusted for competition, successfully synthesise the status of predator taxa. Finally, we found demersal fish communities to separate into a deep, pelagic-like community, and two shallow communities where a shift from exclusive predators to omnivores occurs, moving from the most polluted to the least polluted sampling units.

污染物改变了海洋系统，干扰了生态系统服务的提供；因此，了解他们与生态社区的互动关系对于环境管理至关重要。在这里，我们提出了一种基于相互作用和成分的联合分析，用于生态状态评估，并将其应用于巴格诺利湾的底栖生物群落。我们发现污染对海湾的社区构成有不同的影响，原核生物仅受深度影响，而底栖生物根本不遵循环境梯度。社区结构的分析证实了这一结果，其网络结构表明碳的快速流动和循环，尤其是线虫和多毛cha。经竞争调整的底栖猎物/捕食者生物量比值成功地综合了捕食者类群的状况。