Multidecadal spatial reorganisation of plankton communities in the North East Atlantic
2015
Changes in the spatial distribution of plankton populations are thought to have a profound effect on the oceanic
ecosystem across all levels. This study aims to address how the spatial distribution of different plankton assemblages
has changed over a multidecadal period. The multivariate structure on the CPR dataset is analysed using a
technique called sparse principal component analysis. We identify functional groups of species and show that
there have been changes in the ecoregions in the North East Atlantic over a multidecadal period. This technique
is data-driven and can be used to identify biologically defined ecoregions based on dominant assemblages from
the dataset without relying on prior knowledge. Whilst there is a change in ecoregions across time for both zooplankton
and diatoms, the nature of the changes differs for the two assemblages. For zooplankton species there
has been a shift in the ecoregions towards higher latitudes, implying that cold water zooplankton have moved
further into arctic waters. For species that were previously restricted to the south of the region, these have
been identified with increasing frequency further north. The change in spatial distribution for different species
assemblages can be attributed to different factors. For example, the primary driver of zooplankton abundance
across all spatial locations appears to be temperature. It is speculated that the observed northward movement
of zooplankton species is a response to rising sea surface temperatures. The abundance of diatom species is instead
highly correlated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), with the spatial patterns becoming
more clearly defined in its positive phase. For the diatom species, changes may be cyclic and so mean reverting
to a certain extent, but for the zooplankton, continued changes can be expected if the current warming trend
continues.
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