Fishery species co-occurrence patterns in the Bohai sea, China

The study of species co-occurrences leads to revealing interactions of a wide range of ecological processes. It plays a central role to measure and assess the association between species in a spatio-temporal dimension. The distribution of organisms and the interspecific interactions among species in the communities were investigated using the approach of species co-occurrence patterns. Totally, 114 fisheries species in the Bohai Sea were investigated following fishery-independent data (i.e., a pair of trawlers) during four distinct seasons: winter (January–February), spring (May), summer (August), and autumn (October–November), using a pairwise approach. In the present analysis, the results indicated that the fisheries species association was ‘truly random’, whereas the non-random association was around ten percent among the seasons. The species co-occurrence matrix…