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Long-term Changes and Controlling Factors of Phytoplankton Community in the Gulf of Riga (Baltic Sea)

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Abstract

Trends in phytoplankton monitoring data (1976–2008) from the Gulf of Riga were investigated and linked to environmental factors. Annual means of spring phytoplankton biomass correlated to phosphorus input from land and shifts between diatoms and dinoflagellates were attributed to potential Si limitation and time of sampling relative to the spring phytoplankton succession. The summer phytoplankton biomass, which more than doubled over the study period, was related to the abundance of summer copepods that similarly declined. Cyanobacterial blooms proliferated in summer and the proportion of diatoms similarly declined when the winter–spring inorganic N/P ratio was low. The chlorophyte proportion in summer increased over the study period, and this was linked to increasing temperatures favoring their higher growth rates. The dinoflagellate proportion appeared to decrease with temperatures above a threshold of 15.5°C. Although nutrient inputs and their ratios are important factors for the phytoplankton community, this study suggests that climate change and overfishing could be equally important.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the many persons who have contributed to the Gulf of Riga monitoring program over the years and the Estonian Meteorological and Hydrological Institute as well as the Latvian Hydrometeorological Agency for providing data on land-based inputs. Special thanks to Bärbel Müller-Karulis for organizing the phytoplankton database used for this study. We also thank two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for valuable comments that improved the paper. This research is a contribution to the WISER project (contract #FP7-226273), funded by the European Commission and the project “Support for Doctoral Studies at University of Latvia” supported by the European Social Fund.

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  1. Latvian Institute of Aquatic Ecology, Marine Monitoring Centre, Daugavgrivas 8, LV-1048, Riga, Latvia

    Iveta Jurgensone, Anda Ikauniece & Baiba Kalveka

  2. Department of Marine Ecology, National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University, Frederiksborgvej 399, DK-4000, Roskilde, Denmark

    Jacob Carstensen

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  1. Iveta Jurgensone
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Correspondence to Iveta Jurgensone.

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Jurgensone, I., Carstensen, J., Ikauniece, A. et al. Long-term Changes and Controlling Factors of Phytoplankton Community in the Gulf of Riga (Baltic Sea). Estuaries and Coasts 34, 1205–1219 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-011-9402-x

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