Wide ecological niches ensure frequent harmful dinoflagellate blooms

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) and their consequences cause multiple devastating effects in various freshwater, brackish and marine ecosystems. However, HAB species at moderate population densities have positive ecological roles as primary producers of organic matter and food for zooplankton and fish. They also enhance benthic-pelagic coupling and participate in the biogeochemical cycles. The consequences of HABs are transported across the conventional environmental boundaries by numerous cascade effects in the food webs and beyond. Meanwhile, forecasts of bloom events are still limited, largely because of scarcity of reliable information on ecological niches of the bloom-forming algae. To fill up this knowledge gap, this study focused on dinoflagellates, a diverse group of mostly photosynthesizing protists (unicellular eukaryotes) capable of mixotrophy, since they play a key role in primary production and formation of blooms in marine and brackish waters worldwide. In this study, ecological niches of 17 abundant bloom-forming dinoflagellate species from coastal regions of the southern Baltic Sea were identified for the first time. It was hypothesized that wider ecological niches ensure more frequent dinoflagellate blooms compared to the species with narrower niches. This hypothesis was verified using the long-term (44 years) database on phytoplankton abundance and physical-chemical characteristics of the environment. It were analyzed 4534 datasets collected from 1972 to 2016. Fourteen abiotic parameters (water temperature, salinity, Secchi depth, pH, Chl a, and concentration of basic nutrients) were considered as ecological niche dimensions. The Principal Component Analysis presented the dissolved inorganic nitrogen, total nitrogen, Chl a, and temperature as principal niche dimensions of dinoflagellates. The algal bloom criteria were refined. It was for the first time proved statistically that HAB frequency of dinoflagellate species robustly correlated with the width of their ecological niches.