Phytoplankton Community Composition Determined From Co-variability Among Phytoplankton Pigments From the NAAMES Field Campaign

Abstract

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Analysis of phytoplankton chemotaxonomic markers from high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) pigment determination is a common approach for evaluating phytoplankton community structure from ocean samples. Here, HPLC phytoplankton pigment concentrations from samples collected underway and from CTD bottle sampling on the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES) are used to assess phytoplankton community composition over a range of seasons and environmental conditions. Several data-driven statistical techniques, including hierarchical clustering, Empirical Orthogonal Function, and network-based community detection analyses, are applied to examine the associations between groups of pigments and infer phytoplankton communities found in the surface ocean during the four NAAMES campaigns. From these analyses, five distinguishable phytoplankton community types emerge based on the associations of phytoplankton pigments: diatom, dinoflagellate, haptophyte, green algae, and cyanobacteria. We use this dataset, along with phytoplankton community structure metrics from flow cytometric analyses, to characterize the distributions of phytoplankton biomarker pigments over the four cruises. The physical and chemical drivers influencing the distribution and co-variability of these five dominant groups of phytoplankton are considered. Finally, the composition of the phytoplankton community across the onset, accumulation, and decline of the annual phytoplankton bloom in a changing North Atlantic Ocean is compared to historical paradigms surrounding seasonal succession.

Keywords

• North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study
• phytoplankton
• HPLC pigments
• community detection
• seasonal succession