Multitrophic biodiversity patterns and environmental descriptors of sub‐Arctic lakes in northern Europe

Abstract

1. Arctic and sub-Arctic lakes in northern Europe are increasingly threatened by climate change, which can affect their biodiversity directly by shifting thermal and hydrological regimes, and indirectly by altering landscape processes and catchment vegetation. Most previous studies of northern lake biodiversity responses to environmental changes have focused on only a single organismal group. Investigations at whole-lake scales that integrate different habitats and trophic levels are currently rare, but highly necessary for future lake monitoring and management.2. We analysed spatial biodiversity patterns of 74 sub-Arctic lakes in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Faroe Islands with monitoring data for at least three biological focal ecosystem components (FECs)-benthic diatoms, macrophytes, phytoplankton, littoral benthic macroinvertebrates, zooplankton, and fish-that covered both pelagic and benthic habitats and multiple trophic levels.

Increasing temperature and productivity change biomass, trophic pyramids and community‐level omega‐3 fatty acid content in subarctic lake food webs

“…Subarctic regions provide an excellent natural setting to study this phenomenon as they straddle boreal and Arctic biomes, providing clear diversity, climatic and productivity gradients with relatively simple food webs (Hayden et al, 2017). Furthermore, the subarctic landscape is scattered with lakes that provide abundant and welldefined ecosystems for food web diversity studies (Lau et al, 2020).…”

“…Subarctic regions provide an excellent natural setting to study this phenomenon as they straddle boreal and Arctic biomes, providing clear diversity, climatic and productivity gradients with relatively simple food webs (Hayden et al., 2017). Furthermore, the subarctic landscape is scattered with lakes that provide abundant and well‐defined ecosystems for food web diversity studies (Lau et al., 2020). Increasing temperature and productivity have been shown to shift subarctic lake communities towards more numerous, diverse, smaller‐bodied, warmer‐water‐adapted taxa which are more reliant on pelagic energy sources (Hayden et al., 2017, 2019).…”

Microbial Species–Area Relationships in Antarctic Cryoconite Holes Depend on Productivity

“…Productivity of the environment is thought to significantly shape ISARs, although empirical evidence for how productivity and area interact with species richness has varied with the region and sampling scale of studies [19][20][21][22]. This interaction has not yet been studied for microbes under controlled, comparable conditions.…”

Identifying critical transitions in seasonal shifts of zooplankton composition in a confined coastal salt marsh

“…Physical variability across environmental gradients, biotic effects mediated by top-down or bottom-up forces as well as the trade-offs by constraining traits on species involved determine zooplankton community structure in shallow lakes (Wiggins et al 1980;McQueen et al 1986;Tilman 1987;Wellborn et al 1996;Meerhoff et al 2012;Batzer and Boix 2016;Gascón et al 2016;Tavşanoğlu et al 2017). Dominances of single species in zooplankton assemblages are often described as a consequence of competitive exclusion under low predation pressure (Gliwicz et al 2010;Kerfoot and DeMott 1984) or of extreme environmental constraints, such as those caused by temperature (Herbert and Hann 1986;Lau et al 2020), temperature fluctuations (Zhang et al 2018) or salinity (Boix et al 2007(Boix et al , 2008Waterkeyn et al 2008;Brucet et al 2009Brucet et al , 2012. Regarding salinity, monospecific zooplankton assemblages can be found under extremely high salinities or strong salinity fluctuations in time or space both in inland (Comín et al 1983;Girgin et al 2004;Horváth et al 2014;Tóth et al 2014) or coastal (Attayde and Bozelli 1998;Brucet et al 2010;Emir Akbulut and Tavşanoğlu 2018) brackish or saline waters.…”