Relevance of abiotic criteria used in German lake typology for macroinvertebrate fauna

Abstract

For lake characterisation, top-down typologies are mostly used throughout Europe, including type criteria such as climate, lake area, catchment geology and conductivity. In Germany, a lake typology was applied comprising ecoregion, calcium concentration, Schindler's ratio, stratification type and residence time. However, the relevance of these criteria for the macroinvertebrate fauna has not been conclusively demonstrated till now. Benthic invertebrate community data and related environmental parameters of pristine or near-pristine lakes in Germany were analysed by multivariate analysis techniques to elucidate which environmental parameters are reflected by invertebrate composition. Moreover, benthic invertebrate data were transformed to metrics expressing ecological attributes and species richness (summarising functional composition, diversity and sensitivity measures). Multivariate statistics were used to test whether information relevant to ordination was lost and whether variation decreases using metrics which combine data with ecological attributes. Analysis of lake-type criteria revealed that ecoregions and prevailing substrates were characterized by different taxonomic compositions of macroinvertebrates. In addition, a relationship was found between community composition and lake size. Creating a novel bottom-up lake typology based on ecoregions, lake size and prevailing substrate gives better separation of distinct macroinvertebrate communities and a higher level of homogeneity within groups compared to top-down typology or single environmental parameters alone, both on species and metrics data. Despite some data variation due to methodological differences (e.g. different sampling and sorting techniques) and interannual and seasonal variation in the data set, NMDS ordination presented well-separated groups of bottom-up lake types. Lake types were more precisely separated by species data than by metric data in both top-down and bottom-up typology. However, as information loss from species lists to calculated metrics is marginal, type-specific benthic invertebrate assemblages are reflected both on the species level and on the metric level. Species and

Is coarse taxonomy sufficient for detecting macroinvertebrate patterns in floodplain lakes?

“…Trophic status (Brodersen et al, 1998), transparency (James et al, 2009), substrate (Rieradevall et al, 1999), lake size (Zenker and Baier, 2009) and river connectivity (Pan et al, 2011) have been argued as important predictors of lake macroinvertebrate communities. According to studies of broad geographic areas (i.e., from continental-to global-scale studies), stream-macroinvertebrate richness and taxonomic composition were found to be significantly related to spatial position (Henio and Soininen [across Finland], 2007;Murphy and Davy-Bowker [across England and Wales], 2005).…”

Epiphytic Diatoms along Environmental Gradients in Western European Shallow Lakes

“…Within several biological communities, the abundance of different taxonomic groups depends greatly on lake morphometry [22]. Zenker and Baier [56] for example found an increase of macro-invertebrate richness with lake size. Bolla et al [53] described significant differences between the diatom community structure found at the northern and southern shores of Lake Balaton even under the same water chemical conditions.…”

Intercalibration of aquatic ecological assessment methods in the European Union: Lessons learned and way forward

“…Each country defined national types using widely divergent criteria (e.g. for lakes see Gassner et al, 2005;Kolada et al, 2006;Zenker and Baier, 2009;Kagalou and Leonardos, 2009;Borics et al, 2014). In consequence, merging and comparing these types within the intercalibration exercise was difficult.…”