Water colour, phosphorus and alkalinity are the major determinants of the dominant phytoplankton species in European lak
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WATER BODIES IN EUROPE
Water colour, phosphorus and alkalinity are the major determinants of the dominant phytoplankton species in European lakes Kairi Maileht • Tiina No˜ges • Peeter No˜ges • Ingmar Ott • Ute Mischke • Laurence Carvalho Bernard Dudley
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Received: 15 March 2012 / Accepted: 3 October 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10750-012-1348-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
and latitude, although alkalinity and total phosphorus also appeared to be important explanatory factors. Contrary to our original hypothesis, summer water temperatures had a negligible impact on the distribution of dominants, although, due to the restricted summer season we examined, only a limited temperature gradient was present in the dataset. Cryptophytes occurred more frequently among dominants in Northern Europe whereas cyanobacteria and dinophytes dominated more in Central and Southern Europe. Our analyses suggest that besides nutrient concentrations, other water chemistry variables, such as alkalinity and the content of humic substances, have at least as important a role in determining the distribution of the dominant phytoplankton species in European lakes.
Guest editors: C. K. Feld, A. Borja, L. Carvalho & D. Hering / Water bodies in Europe: integrative systems to assess ecological status and recovery
Keywords WISER Project Geographical gradients Nutrients CCA Water temperature
Abstract Analysis of phytoplankton data from about 1,500 lakes in 20 European countries has revealed that two-thirds of the species that dominate lakes during the summer are dominant right across Europe. Using Canonical Correspondence Analyses, we have examined how both habitat conditions within lakes and environmental factors over broad geographical scales explained the distribution of the 151 most common summer dominant species. The distributions of these species were best explained by water colour
K. Maileht (&) T. No˜ges P. No˜ges I. Ott Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Centre for Limnology, Estonian University of Life Sciences, 61117 Rannu Parish, Tartu County, Estonia e-mail: [email protected] U. Mischke Department of Shallow Lakes and Lowland Rivers, Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Justus-von-Liebig-Str. 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany L. Carvalho B. Dudley Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), Bush Estate, Penicuik, Midlothian EH26 0QB, UK
Introduction Despite continuous efforts of generations of algologists studying individual lakes, the biogeographical distribution of freshwater phytoplankton and its driving factors are still largely unknown. Padisa´k et al. (2003) pointed out that this may because taxonomic and floristic work has had a stronger focus in small lakes, the bulk of our knowledge on the ecology of phytoplankton is derived from relatively large lakes. The major problem in biogeographical studies has
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Hydrobiologi
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