2.3 Access of climate and tide data
We extracted the data of each
site from the WorldClim dataset (Hijmans et al., 2005) for mean annual
temperature (MAT) and mean annual precipitation (MAP), and from Global
Tidal Forecasting Service (http://global-tide.nmdis.org.cn/) for tide
and tidal currents datasets. Specifically, the highest tide, the lowest
tide, the fastest tidal current and the slowest tidal current were
obtained from the nearest tide station. Since the annual average of the
tide data is not available, we used the data of four months (January,
April, July and October) to represent the whole year. We calculated the
annual highest tide (AHT), annual lowest tide (ALT), annual fastest tide
current (AFC) and annual slowest tide current (ASC). We also measured
sea surface salinity (SAL) at each site using the Portable Refractometer
(Apu, China).