Sponsor
This project was supported by the National Key Special Project of Sci-tech for Water Pollution Control and Management (No. 2012ZX07501002-003), the Education Department of Hainan Province (Hnky2020-60) and Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 322RC79).
Published In
Ecology and Evolution
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-5-2022
Subjects
Phytoplankton algal blooms
Abstract
Phytoplankton functional traits can represent particular environmental conditions in complex aquatic ecosystems. Categorizing phytoplankton species into functional groups is challenging and time-consuming, and requires high-level expertise in species autecology. In this study, we introduced an affinity analysis to aid the identification of candidate associations of phytoplankton from two data sets comprised of phytoplankton and environmental information. In the Huaihe River Basin with a drainage area of 270,000 km2 in China, samples were collected from 217 selected sites during the low-water period in May 2013; monthly samples were collected during 2006–2011 in a man-made pond, Dishui Lake. Our results indicated that the affinity analysis can be used to define some meaningful functional groups. The identified phytoplankton associations reflect the ecological preferences of phytoplankton in terms of light and nutrient acquisition. Advantages and disadvantages of applying the affinity analysis to identify phytoplankton associations are discussed with perspectives on their utility in ecological assessment.
Rights
Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1002/ece3.9047
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38134
Citation Details
Zhu, W., Ding, Z., Pan, Y., & Wang, Q. (2022). Using an affinity analysis to identify phytoplankton associations. Ecology and Evolution, 12(7), e9047.