Modelling the future response of zooplankton species to climate change in the North Atlantic

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Recent advances in habitat modelling allow us to assess climate change impacts on species distribution. We evaluate the impacts of future climate change in community structure, occurrence distribution, and phenology of 14 copepod species in the North Atlantic Ocean. To this end, historical observations from Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) and environmental data extracted from POLCOMS-ERSEM model have been used. Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) have been applied to relate the species occurrence with environmental variables (sea surface temperature and salinity, bathymetry, pH, O2, mixed layer depth, surface phytoplankton biomass). North Atlantic regime shift has been taken into account to perform a temporal cross-validation of the model. To this end, a subset of 4 Calanus spp. (C. finmarchicus, C. glacialis, C. helgolandicus, C. hyperboreus) between 1970 and 2004 have been used, comparing cold (1970-1986) with warm (1987-2004) regimes. Results have shown that model accuracy is relatively good (74-85%) for the models built in cold regime and extrapolated and validated in the warm period. Therefore, species models can be used to be projected in future climate simulations with relative confidence. On a second step, it is intended to extend the analysis by comparing GAMs with Maximum Entropy model and Mahalanobis distance algorithm