The composition of zooplankton communities varies with latitude, when spanning different climatic zones ( Xu et al., 2016). Zooplankton play key roles in food webs and biogeochemical cycles ( Longhurst, 1991 Richardson, 2008 Mackas and Beaugrand, 2010), and the study of zooplankton communities of shelf ecosystems is crucial because these are high productivity areas, supporting over half of the world’s marine fisheries ( Caddy et al., 1998 Mossop, 2007).
Coastal plankton communities exhibit high variability ( Ribera d’Alcalà et al., 2004) because, in addition to larger-scale oceanographic and atmospheric forcing effects, they are also subject to smaller-scale effects due to interactions between water circulation and bathymetry, benthic–pelagic interactions and terrestrial inputs of freshwater, nutrients and pollutants through rivers and estuarine plumes ( Pepin et al., 2015).
#The king ccgen drivers
Knowledge of the effect of environmental drivers on marine plankton is essential to be able to predict the response of pelagic ecosystems to environmental change ( Pepin et al., 2015). Differences in co-generic species dominance between sites depicted the latitudinal gradient.
Acartia clausi) dominated showed common relationships with temperature, consistent with a common thermal niche. Podon and Evadne, which decreased from south to north, reflected latitude-related differences driven more by salinity than by temperature. The main differences in copepod and cladoceran genera reflected the oceanic influence, with highest presence of Corycaeus and Oncaea at L4, likely related to the higher influence of off-shelf water intrusions, and neritic Acartia dominating at SH, U35 and B35. The interaction between latitude and distance offshore or salinity and phytoplankton biomass explained smaller percentages of the variability. Doliolids were best indicators of temperature-mediated latitudinal differences. Latitudinal differences were best indicated by contrasting abundances of cirripede larvae and doliolids (most abundant at the lowest latitude sites) and bryozoan and polychaete larvae (most abundant at the highest latitude site). For coarse zooplankton groups latitude explained the main between-site differences, and meroplankton contributed more than holoplankton. Contribution of latitude, distance offshore and environmental factors to variations in zooplankton assemblages across the Northeast Atlantic Shelves Province, from the Bay of Biscay to the English Channel (Plymouth L4 L4) and the North Sea (Stonehaven SH), were assessed mainly by redundancy analysis.
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