Abstract
Plankton biodiversity is a key component of marine pelagic ecosystems. They are at the base of the food web, control the productivity of marine ecosystems, and provide many provisioning and regulating ecological services. It is therefore important to understand how plankton are organized in both space and time. Here, we use data of varying taxonomic resolution, collected by the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey, to map phytoplankton and zooplankton biodiversity in the North Atlantic and its adjacent seas. We then decompose biodiversity into 24 species assemblages and investigate their spatial distribution using ecological units and ecoregions recently proposed. Finally, we propose a descriptive method, which we call the environmental chromatogram, to characterize the environmental signature of each plankton assemblage. The method is based on a graphic that identifies where species of an assemblage aggregate along an environmental gradient composed of multiple ecological dimensions. The decomposition of the biodiversity into species assemblages allows us to show (a) that most marine regions of the North Atlantic are composed of coenoclines (i.e., gradients of biocoenoses or communities) and (b) that the overlapping spatial distribution of assemblages is the result of their environmental signatures. It follows that neither the ecoregions nor the ecological units identified in the North Atlantic are characterized by a unique assemblage but instead by a mosaic of assemblages that overlap in many places.
Highlights
Plankton are a key component of marine pelagic ecosystems controlling their productivity (Edwards et al, 2013)
We used nine environmental parameters to characterize the environmental signature of each assemblage using a procedure that leads to the display of what we propose to call an environmental chromatogram
With the exception of four assemblages (1, 4, 9, and 11) that had a correlation lower than 0.5, all assemblages had correlations above 0.5. This result confirmed that the environmental signature of phytoplankton and zooplankton was similar for all assemblages, the strength of these similarities varied from one assemblage to another
Summary
Plankton are a key component of marine pelagic ecosystems controlling their productivity (Edwards et al, 2013). The partition was primarily based on spatiotemporal fluctuations in plankton biodiversity and physical data (e.g., bathymetry, SST, mean surface current) This new partition was built at a relatively fine spatial resolution (i.e., 0.5° latitude × 0.5° longitude) in contrast to previous global studies (Longhurst, 1998) and was the result of the analysis of six key plankton groups (dinoflagellates, diatoms, small and large copepods, small and large zooplankton other than copepods). The main objective of this study was to decompose the biodiversity into species assemblages and to relate them with the partition proposed by Beaugrand, Edwards, et al (2019) Such a work is needed to provide an information on the biotic composition of the ecological units and ecoregions of the North Atlantic and its adjacent seas. We examined the composition of each ecoregion and ecological unit (sensu Beaugrand, Edwards, et al, 2019) in terms of assemblage
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