A CHEMTAX‐derived phytoplankton community structure during 12‐year observations in the Gulf of Naples (LTER‐MC)

Abstract

Marine ecosystems are experiencing many changes in response to natural processes, human activities and climate change, with phytoplankton community structure and dynamics strongly affected by shifts in hydrological regimes (Chavez et al., 2011;Kulk et al., 2020;Marty et al., 2002;Marty & Chiavérini, 2010). Phytoplankton is a key component of marine ecosystem functioning, being represented by primary producers contributing about half of the global net primary production with strong implication for global carbon fluxes, biogeochemical cycles, and ocean-atmosphere interactions (e.g., Bauer

The Gulf of Naples as a model system for plankton ecology studies

“…Some studies took into consideration a large period of the LTER-MC time-series and examined trends of environmental variables (Kokozska et al, 2023;Romillac et al, 2023), revealing that, in the case of plankton, hydrographic changes including inshore-offshore exchanges, the residence time of freshwater and the shallowing of the mixed layer depth are more important than simple temperature increase recorded in summer. The response of plankton is seen in the increased contribution over the years of the autumnal blooms deriving from a lengthening of the stratification period, and in significant trends in specific elements of the phyto-and meso-zooplankton (Saggiomo et al, 2023;Mazzocchi et al 2023). Interestingly the observed environmental changes are contrasted by the overall stability of the whole mesozooplankton community (Mazzocchi et al, 2023), which parallels the resistance to interannual variation recently highlighted for phytoplankton (Longobardi et al, 2022).…”

“…A whole range of classical and advanced approaches were used to address plankton variability, including the analysis of physical-chemical, biological and diversity data from the natural environment (Kokozska et al, 2023;Mazzocchi et al, 2023;Romillac et al, 2023;Zingone et al, 2023), laboratory experiments (e.g., Carotenuto et al, 2023;René et al 2023;Traboni et al, 2023) and more sophisticated chemotaxonomic (Saggiomo et al, 2023) and biomolecular approaches (Di Capua et al, 2023;Mordret et al, 2023;Russo et al, 2023). The latter studies have addressed temporal trends in groups of species hardly detected by morphological studies, unveiling, for example, a high amount of dinoflagellate diversity not assigned to any described taxa (Mordret et al, 2023).…”