Biodiv Sci ›› 2024, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (6): 24128.  DOI: 10.17520/biods.2024128  cstr: 32101.14.biods.2024128

• Original Papers: Animal Diversity • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Fish diversity and connectivity in six national marine protected areas in the East China Sea

Yihui Jiang1, Yue Liu1, Xu Zeng1, Zheying Lin1, Nan Wang1, Jihao Peng1, Ling Cao2(), Cong Zeng1,2,*()()   

  1. 1. School of Oceanography, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030
    2. State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian 361102
  • Received:2024-04-05 Accepted:2024-05-14 Online:2024-06-20 Published:2024-05-16
  • Contact: * E-mail: congzeng@sjtu.edu.cn

Abstract:

Aim: Global climate change and anthropogenic impacts are placing enormous pressures on coastal ecosystems, and networks of marine protected areas have been recognized as an effective means of dealing with these dual pressures. However, there have been few investigations of biodiversity and connectivity of marine protected areas, in particular a lack of studies at the multispecies level. As one of the most biologically rich regions in China and an important contributor to China’s rapid socio-economic development, a number of protected areas have been established in the East China Sea at the end of the last century, but not much research has been conducted on biodiversity and connectivity to support the conservation and sustainable development.
Methods: In this study, six national marine protected areas were selected in the East China Sea, including Chengzhou Island National Marine Park (CZD), Shenhu Bay National Nature Reserve (SHW), Meizhou Island National Marine Park (MZD), Haitan Bay National Marine Park in Pingtan (PTD), Dongtou National Marine Park (DTD) and Yuhuan National Marine Park (YH). Water samples were collected from sandy coast. Environmental DNA was amplified with MiFish-U primers and high-throughput sequencing was performed by Illumina NovaSeq. Permutational multivariate analysis of variance was performed to determine the differences in community composition among protected areas. Network analysis was performed to assess robustness within each marine protected area.
Results: A total of 71 samples were obtained, including 5,069,193 reads and 46,309 MOTUs, from six protected areas in different seasons. Further analysis revealed that the abundance of MOTUs shared between protected areas accounted for more than 40% of the total MOTUs abundance. Although the environments differed significantly among protected areas, there were no spatial differences in biodiversity and community structure among protected areas (P > 0.05), and only seasonal differences observed. DTD, SHW and YH had a more complex network structure, while MZD and PTD were relatively simpler.
Conclusion: The results of the study suggest that there is a strong connectivity among these protected areas, which has the potential to establish a network of marine protected areas. The community network structures of the protected areas reveal that the protection effects vary from different protected areas, which may be related to the size and management of the protected areas. This study not only provides a reference for the study of nearshore community connectivity in the East China Sea, but also offers direct support for the management and construction of protected areas network in East China Sea.

Key words: marine protected areas, protected area networks, environmental DNA, network analysis, connectivity, biodiversity

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