Spatial niches of dominant zooplankton species in Yueqing Bay, Zhejiang Province

Abstract

The index of dominance (S), average crowding (X*), niche breadth (Bi), and niche overlap (Qik ) of dominant zooplankton species were calculated using data collected from four zooplankton surveys from May 2016 to February 2017 in Yueqing Bay, Zhejiang Province. The results showed that there were 17 dominant zooplankton species (with S＞0.02). The niche breadth values of those dominant species differed greatly and were positively correlated with S. The niche overlaps of zooplanktons were extremely low. The total amount of species pairs with niche overlap higher than 0.6 (Qik＞0.6) were 25 in Yueqing Bay, which represented 18.4% of the total pairs. Results from the redundancy analysis showed that the distribution of dominant zooplankton species was mainly affected by temperature and salinity, which caused ecological differentiation of zooplankton species.