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Changes in the phytoplankton community at Helgoland, North Sea: lessons from single spot time series analyses

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Abstract

In recent regime shift analyses, the phytoplankton compartment of the marine food web was essentially represented by phytoplankton color or chlorophyll concentration. A detection of changes directly at the species level is highly desirable. The Helgoland Roads data series, a collection of high frequency long-term time series comprising biological and physico-chemical components of the southern North Sea, allow such an investigation at the level of single species. Aiming at a detection and characterization of habitat and community changes in the observation period (1962 until the end of 2008), we selected six species as representatives of certain classes, for example, benthic or neritic species, and applied a combination of novel analysis methods—a fitness-based analysis of the realized niche, a bloom-triggered averaging and a Markovian analysis of co-occurrence and succession patterns—to related abundance time series and concurrent environmental parameter time series. We found a general trend toward enlargement of niche size and shifts of the niche position, interesting salinity patterns around bloom events of two species, and statistically highly significant changes of a phytoplankton community segment after 1965 and after 1998. Interpreting our observations in ecological terms leads to the formulation of testable hypotheses.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the crews of RV Aade and RV Ellenbogen for their dedication to the long-term monitoring program, and we acknowledge all those who measured the physico-chemical parameters, temperature, and nutrients and counted phytoplankton samples at Helgoland Roads. We thank Germany`s National Meteorological Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst) for providing the wind speed and sunshine duration data. This study was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Priority Program 1162 “The Impact of Climate Variability on Aquatic Ecosystems: Match and Mismatch Resulting from Shifts in Seasonality and Distribution” (AQUASHIFT).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICBM, University of Oldenburg, Carl von Ossietzky Str. 9-11, 26111, Oldenburg, Germany

    Jan A. Freund, Nico Grüner & Sabrina Brüse

  2. Biologische Anstalt Helgoland, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, P.O. Box 180, 27483, Helgoland, Germany

    Karen H. Wiltshire

  3. School of Engineering and Science, Jacobs University Bremen, Campus Ring 1, 28759, Bremen, Germany

    Karen H. Wiltshire

Authors
  1. Jan A. Freund
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  2. Nico Grüner
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  3. Sabrina Brüse
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  4. Karen H. Wiltshire
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jan A. Freund.

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Communicated by R. Adrian.

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Freund, J.A., Grüner, N., Brüse, S. et al. Changes in the phytoplankton community at Helgoland, North Sea: lessons from single spot time series analyses. Mar Biol 159, 2561–2571 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-012-2013-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-012-2013-7

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