Key Traits in Functional Traits Network Can Identify Temporal Structure of Fish Community in Coastal Waters

Abstract

Traditional analysis of fish community structure is based on species composition and abundance, ignoring many functional attributes. Fish functional traits can reflect the attributes and functions of fish community. However, whether the functional traits and which traits can reflect the differences in temporal structure of fish community is still little known. In our study, we used traits network analysis, principal coordinates analysis, cluster analysis and Spearman correlation analysis to examine the interannual changes of functional traits, construct a functional traits network, identify key traits, and explore the temporal structure and functions changes of fish community in the Haizhou Bay and its adjacent waters, China, from 2013 to 2022 based on the functional traits data. Various functional traits changed greatly over the past decade, indicating strong changes in attributes and functions. All 95 correlations in the functional traits network were positive, indicating that there was no competitive relationship among the functional traits and environmental filtering might play an extremely important role in the entire community assembly. The temporal structure of fish community was identified based on 10 key traits, and was consistent with that in species-based analysis. There were highly significant positive correlations between the similarity matrices of the key traits and the species matrix, indicating that interannual differences in key traits can well represent discrepancy in temporal structure of fish community. Our study showed that key traits in functional traits network could identify the temporal structure of fish community and revealed differences in functions of different temporal components.

Keywords: fish community, Functional Traits, traits network, key traits, temporal structure