The relative importance of dispersal and local processes in structuring phytoplankton communities in a set of highly interconnected ponds

By P. Vanormelingen, Karl Cottenie, E. Michels, K. Muylaert, Wim Vyverman, L. De Meester. 2008

93 citations recorded by the source corpus.

1. The recognition that both local and regional processes act together in shaping local communities makes determining their relative roles in natural communities central to understanding patterns in community structure. 2. We investigated the relative influence of these processes on the phytoplankton communities of a highly interconnected pond system. We sampled the phytoplankton communities of 28 ponds concurrently with 20 local environmental variables. 3. We found that phytoplankton community variation, in terms of both phytoplankton community composition (PCC) and diversity, was only significantly explained by local environmental variables. These were mainly associated with the contrasting clear-water and turbid ecological states of the shallow ponds studied. Clear-water conditions favoured only a few taxa, resulting in a significantly lower taxon diversity and richness under these conditions. 4. The failure to explain variation in PCC by a dispersal model based on the water flow between ponds points at very effective species sorting. This is attributed to the high population turn-over rates and sensitivity to environmental conditions of phytoplankton communities. Some evidence was found, however, that dispersal influences local communities through mass effects between neighbouring ponds. 5. Overall, our results emphasize both the strong selection pressure that components of the food web exert on phytoplankton communities and the high potential of these communities to respond to such environmental change, thereby effectively opposing the homogenizing effects of continuous dispersal.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1184b13de56a033a826aa587e34c3d371668ebc3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Chemistry

1. J. Heino
2. T. Erős
3. Dénes Schmera

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. J. Heino
2. G. Bugbee
3. Roslyn Selsky
4. Robert S. Capers
5. T. Erős
6. Dénes Schmera
7. J. Soininen
8. D. Galassi

In Oceanography

1. J. Heino

Citations in the corpus

• A macroecological perspective of diversity patterns in the freshwater realm (2011, background): “, 2003), and for pond phytoplankton communities that were structured by environmental variables (Vanormelingen et al., 2008) across a small landscape.”
• The relative importance of local conditions and regional processes in structuring aquatic plant communities (2010, background): “of species and the regional distribution of environmental conditions (Vanormelingen et al., 2008).”