Salinity regimen and estuarine biota distribution

What is it about?

In this paper, we provide a model to understand the complex relationship between the salinity regimen (average and extreme conditions) and the species distribution in estuarine environments, which represents an advance in the estuarine ecology field going further the Venice system and other approaches only based on average conditions. Indeed, the results of this work confirm the biological relevance of both average and extreme conditions of salinity.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The results of this work confirm the biological relevance of both average and extreme conditions of salinity. The great natural variability of the salinity in estuaries is synthesized in a reduced number of homogeneous salinity types capable of explaining the spatial patterns of species. The establishment of such ecologically significant salinity types can be beneficial to a wide range of scientific and management works (e.g. environmental flows or climate change analysis). Furthermore, the proposed approach and the obtained results are potentially extrapolated to different types of estuaries around the world because these ecosystems are subjected to a strong temporal and spatial variability of salinity that mainly determine the species distribution.