Fig. 3 Boxplots
displayed the spatiotemporal distributions of richness (a. Chao 1) and
diversity (b. Shannon) of microbial flagellate communities. The hollow
diamonds represented average values of individual index in each group.
The numbers in parentheses
represent the sample size for each water masses, including two size
fractions. Water masses with less than 5 samples were not included in
this analysis. The Mc and Zd were considered as coastal waters, the Cm,
Es, and Ss were considered as mixed waters, while the Ks, Km, Sm,
Ss-2017, Su-2017, and Pu-2017 were assorted to oceanic waters. Asterisk
indicates significant differences at the level of p <
0.01 (**, p < 0.01; ***, p < 0.001).