Occupancy and species interactions in biodiversity assessment of Antarctic plankton: the missing link (Manuscript submitted Ecological Processes Journal) ...

• Main Authors: Grillo, Marco, Schiaparelli, Stefano, Durazzano, Tiziana, Guglielmo, Letterio, Granata, Antonia, Huettmann, Falk
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2024
• Subjects: Antarctic; Ross Sea; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11175587; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.11175587

Plankton, as an essential ecological category, occupies the lower levels of aquatic trophic networks, playing a pivotal role in energy transfers and serving as a reliable environmental indicator for altered ecosystems. There is a critical need for studies that consider the potential biological interactions among planktonic taxa, as they can possibly capture and quantify cascading changes in species. In this pioneering study, we addressed this gap by evaluating possible correlations through a statistical analysis of co-occurrence among different Antarctic marine phytoplankton, meso- and microzooplankton taxa. Information from over 50 environmental descriptors obtained from the Polar Macroscopic Layers, stored in the Quantartica package (open source GIS platform QGIS) was incorporated and the distribution of the selected co-occurring taxa i.e. six copepod species and six classes of phytoplanktonic groups, was modelled. The predictive maps were obtained by applying artificial intelligence techniques. ... : 4. Supplemental Materials Appendix A Absence and presence matrix with related environmental descriptors. Appendix B Lattice grid of Ross Sea with environmental descriptors with rasters utilized. Appendix C Correlation matrix values filed data and figure. Appendix D Details models. Appendix E VIP analysis values Appendix F Figure correlation plot with RIO values Appendix G Predictive maps for each copepod species and for each phytoplankton assemblages analysed. Appendix H Predictor layers for each copepod and phytoplankton assemblage with the RIO-prediction for TreeNet, RandomForest, CART Decision Tree and Ensemble models. Appendix I Metadata ...