Regional resilience of coastal plankton communities to global warming
S. A. Piontkovski1, Yu. A. Zagorodnyaya2, I. Yu. Prusova2
1Sevastopol State University, Sevastopol, Russia
2Federal state budgetary scientific institution Federal Research Center "A.O. Kovalevsky Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas of RAS", Sevastopol, Russia
Keywords: zooplankton, resilience, World Ocean, global warming
Abstract
Structural and functional characteristics of plankton communities are widely used as ecological indicators of global ocean warming. In terms of long-term variability, they indicate the existence of monotonous negative, positive and “zero” trends, i. e. their absence. The latter can be considered as phenomena of regional resilience of plankton communities to global warming. Based on the materials of regional sampling and international databases, an analysis of the interannual variability of zooplankton biomass and indices of its species diversity in the Arabian, Mediterranean and Black seas (from 2000 to 2023) was carried out. For comparison, data on biomass measurements in five other regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were used. It is shown that the duration of the existence of phenomena of regional stability of plankton communities ranges from several to tens of years, in a wide range of species diversity and biological productivity of waters. In most of the studied regions, the absence of interannual trends in zooplankton biomass corresponded to their absence in the interannual variability of chlorophyll a concentration as an indicator of phytoplankton biomass. Such a correspondence indirectly indicates a trophic basis for the interannual stability of zooplankton biomass.
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