Towards the dominance of Boreal zooplankton in the European Arctic?

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We studied summer mesozooplankton composition between 2001 and 2009, in the epipelagic zone of the West Spitsbergen Current (WSC) and adjacent areas, which constitute a transition zone between warmer Atlantic and cold Arctic waters. The novel spatial analysis method of principal coordinates of neighbour matrices (PCNM) and the following variation partitioning, were applied to disentangle the contributions of environmental variables and spatial differences in explaining zooplankton variation. In spite of the large geographical area covered, environmental factors explained 30.6% of zooplankton variability, while the spatial distribution of sampling stations was responsible for 27.2%, whereas 12.5% was a common share of both predictors, coming from their correlations. We observed a gradual transition from dominance of ubiquitous and Boreo-Arctic species towards increasing contribution of Boreal ones such as Calanus finmarchicus.