The Amazon River plume, a barrier to animal dispersal in the Western Tropical Atlantic.

ABSTRACT: The dispersal of marine organisms can be restricted by a set of isolation mechanisms including hard barriers or hydrological features. In the Western Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon River discharge has been shown to act as a biogeographical barrier responsible for the differences in reef fish communities between Caribbean Sea and Northeast Brazil continental shelves. Here, we compare the diversity of all Animalia phyla from biogeographic ecoregions along the Tropical Western Atlantic continental shelf to test the hypothesis that the Amazon River plume spatially structures species diversity. For that, we used beta diversity estimators and multivariate ecological analysis on a database of species occurrence of the whole animal kingdom including 175,477 occurrences of 8,375 species from six ecoreg

SUBMITTER: Giachini Tosetto E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8752809 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature