Fig. 6

Patterns of mean Levin’s niche breadth index of local communities across depths in different months fitted by second-order polynomial model based on ordinary least squares regression. The unit of MNB is layer(s) (\(MNB\in <span class='reftype'><span class='reftype'><span class='reftype'>[0, 11]</span></span></span>\)). A higher MNB value indicates that the community harbors more generalist taxa that are more uniformly distributed across environments, while low value indicates that the community harbors more specialists that favor specific environments