Spatial and temporal variations in copepod community structure in the lower St. Lawrence Estuary, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The lower St. Lawrence estuary (LSLE) is a narrow and deep basin under the influence of both estuarine and marine processes. As a result, the LSLE is characterized by strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity in biological and physical environmental conditions. Previous studies have indicated a bias in the summer composition of the copepod population for predominance of late-development stages of Calanus spp., in comparison with adjacent waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence (GSL) and northwest Atlantic. In this study, we use a 22 mo spatial survey of the LSLE to determine spatial and temporal variations in the copepod community and the relative contribution of Calanus spp. (C. finmarchicus and C. hyperboreus). Multivariate analysis revealed 4 copepod assemblages associated with seasonal patterns in temperature and chlorophyll a. Calanus spp. dominated the early summer community whereas the seasonal increase in abundance of the more surface-dwelling species (Acartia spp., Oithona spp. and Pseudocalanus spp.) explained the mixed Calanus spp./surface species community observed in late summer-autumn and winter. Three recurrent geographic zones can be discriminated in the LSLE on the basis of specific composition and abundance. The copepod community in the upper-central Laurentian Channel was dominated by Calanus spp. Downstream, in late summer-autumn and winter, a mixed Calanus/surface species assemblage was observed. In the shallow region, a very low abundance of Calanus spp. resulted in dominance of surface species after the early summer period. The genus Calanus spp. was the dominant component of the copepod community in LSLE as a whole because of its consistently high abundance along the Laurentian Channel during different seasons. A change in environmental conditions in the 1990s associated with a decadal climate variation in the GSL-LSLE region appears to be related to a dramatic increase in abundance of midwater copepod species (mainly Metridia longa) and, subsequent decline in the relative abundance of Calanus spp. We develop the hypothesis that the observed patterns in copepod species composition in the LSLE are primarily a consequence of the combined effect of the export in the residual surface outflow of early life stages of Calanus spp. and small surface-dwelling species and the upstream advection of late-development stages of Calanus spp. and midwater species in the inflowing deep water of the Laurentian Channel.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".