The Zambian Macrophyte Trophic Ranking scheme, ZMTR: A new biomonitoring protocol to assess the trophic status of tropical southern African rivers

Niche-breadth of freshwater macrophytes occurring in tropical southern African rivers predicts species global latitudinal range

“…An obvious criticism of our results is that most of the biophysico-chemical data are based on single snapshot samples (though a small proportion (<10%) of samples did represent repeatsampling from some individual sites: for more on this see Kennedy et al, 2015Kennedy et al, , 2016. This undoubtedly increases the noise in the dataset, and future work should endeavour to gain more data, across seasons and years, from Zambian rivers.…”

“…As well as macrophytes, this survey recorded benthic macroinvertebrates and water physico-chemistry at each site. Survey methods, site locations and results are reported in detail by Kennedy et al (2015): and supplementary online files associated with that paper; Kennedy et al (2016); Lowe et al (2013b);, with relevant methods summarised briefly below. From the dataset, 176 samples (mostly from rivers: 90% of samples; but with a small number of samples from associated static-water sites in riverine floodplains, comprising lagoons: 7%; dambos: 2%; and backwaters/oxbows: 1%) were selected for use in the niche-breadth analysis exercise.…”

“…Water samples were collected, and stored in 10 mL glass sample vials for subsequent laboratory determination of soluble reactive phosphate (SRP) following standard methods (MAFF, 1986;APHA, 1998). Full details of phosphate analyses are provided in Kennedy et al (2016).…”

Environmental drivers of freshwater macrophyte diversity and community composition in calcareous warm‐water rivers of America and Africa

“…Tropical: centred on 13°S, 29°E (latitude range: 8.89090–17.8875°S), sampled 2006–11. In Zambia only, some sites were repeat‐sampled in wet and dry seasons of a single year, or in different years during the study period (for more on this see Kennedy et al., , ); Botswana: tropical: 21 sites in the Okavango Delta, centred on 18.8°S, 22.5°E (latitude range: 18.33908–19.57003°S); sampled 2006; and South Africa: warm‐temperate: 11 sites, in the Highveld area of the Vaal River, centred on 26.5°S, 29.5°E (latitude range: 26.36711–26.97082°S); sampled 2009–10.…”

“…Dry‐season sampling also minimised the possibility of post‐flood changes in water chemistry skewing results. Some sites in Zambia were sampled during both wet and dry seasons, and substantial changes to water chemistry were observed following flood events (Kennedy, Racey, Iason, & Soulsby, ; Kennedy et al., , ). Individual samples from these repeat‐sampled sites were, however, treated as discrete units; hence, the effects of wet season conditions on analytical results were identifiable.…”