Plankton biogeography in the North Atlantic Ocean and its adjacent seas: Species assemblages and environmental signatures

• Published in: Ecology and Evolution
• Main Authors: Kléparski, Loïck, Beaugrand, Grégory, Edwards, Martin
• Other Authors: Marine Biological Association, Laboratoire d’Océanologie et de Géosciences (LOG) - UMR 8187 (LOG), Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale (ULCO)-Université de Lille-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD France-Nord ), Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale (ULCO), Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2021
• Subjects: biogeography; coenoclines; environmental signature; macroecology; North Atlantic Ocean; plankton; taxonomic assemblages; [SDE]Environmental Sciences; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-04287183; https://hal.science/hal-04287183/document; https://hal.science/hal-04287183/file/Kl%C3%A9parski%20et%20al%202021.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.7406

International audience 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.