Resilience of plant and testate amoeba communities after climatic and anthropogenic disturbances in a Baltic bog in Northern Poland: Implications for ecological restoration

Abstract

This study explores the history of the development of Sphagnum communities in an ombrotrophic peatland -Bagno Kusowo -over the past 650 years, based on high-resolution plant macrofossil and testate amoebae analysis. Our research provided information related to the length of peatland existence and the characteristics of its natural/pristine state before the most recent human impacts. Changes in the Sphagnum communities before human impact could have resulted from climate cooling during the 'Little Ice Age' (LIA). In this cold and unstable hydrological period, among vascular plants, Eriophorum vaginatum and Baeothryon caespitosum dominated in the peatland vegetation. Peat-forming Sphagnum communities survived the drainage conducted during the 20th century at the Bagno Kusowo bog. We provide three important messages through this study: (1) testate amoebae reflect similar hydrological trends in two peat cores despite considerable microhabitat variability, (2) average long-term water level 10 cm below the surface should be a target for active bog conservation and (3) sites like Bagno Kusowo are extremely important to preserve the remains of pristine biodiversity (including genetic diversity of plants and protists) that was completely removed from most of the raised bogs in Europe due to human activities, for example, drainage.

Decreased carbon accumulation feedback driven by climate‐induced drying of two southern boreal bogs over recent centuries

“…The SHL testate amoeba record suggests large moisture change towards wetter habitat conditions dated to c. 1940-1950 ad, but the plant-based WTD remained relatively stable; the assemblages were dominated by S. rubellum with a large tolerance of 8 cm ( Figure S1). For LHL, In general, plant-and testate amoeba-based WTD reconstructions support each other, while the latter tends to have more and/or larger variations, as also suggested by previous studies (Gałka et al, 2017;Väliranta et al, 2012;. Therefore, we used testate amoeba-based WTD reconstructions for linear regression analysis when available, that is, for all the other cores except LLs where only plant-based WTD reconstructions existed.…”

Vegetation Succession, Carbon Accumulation and Hydrological Change in Subarctic Peatlands, Abisko, Northern Sweden

“…During the LIA moisture patterns differed between northeast and central-east Europe. Northwest Europe and Scandinavia incurred shifts towards wetter climate (Charman et al, 2006;Swindles et al, 2007Swindles et al, , 2010aValiranta et al, 2007;Mauquoy et al, 2008), while central-east Europe tended towards drier conditions (Gałka et al, 2014(Gałka et al, , 2017Feurdean et al, 2015). The different palaeohydrological pathways in peatland development in northwest Europe, Scandinavia and central-east Europe could be connected to the fluctuations in large-scale atmospheric circulation (Feurdean et al, 2015;Gałka et al, 2017).…”

Assessing the ecological value of small testate amoebae (<45 μm) in New Zealand peatlands

“…Most of the work on peatland testate amoebae has been undertaken on Northern Hemisphere Sphagnum bogs Booth and Zygmunt, 2005;Charman et al, 2004;Gałka et al, 2017;Lamentowicz et al, 2008;Mitchell et al, 1999;Swindles et al, 2010). In contrast, testate amoebae remain less studied in the Southern Hemisphere, apart from New Zealand (Charman, 1997;Wilmshurst et al, 2002;Wilmshurst et al, 2003), but recent work is now emerging from Australia (Bamforth, 2015;Meisterfeld et al, 2008;Zheng et al, 2019), South America (Fernández et al, 2016;Fernández et al, 2015;Van Bellen et al, 2014) and Antarctica (Charman et al, 2018;Stelling et al, 2018).…”