Pelagic species size distributions in lakes: Are they discontinuous?

By T. D. Havlicek, Stephen R. Carpenter. 2001

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aquatic ecologists have many models for size distributions of pelagic communities. However, few studies have looked for discontinuities (clumps of similarly sized species or gaps of sizes that contain no or relatively few species) in pelagic community size structure. We investigated size distribution characteristics in aquatic communities by calculating kernel density functions for plankton and fish in 11 lakes in Wisconsin. Size distributions in aquatic communities of these lakes were not smooth. Rather, multiple lump and gap regions were found within each functional group of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish. Simulations showed the gaps could not be explained by incomplete censuses of species or by systematic underestimation of intraspecific size variation. In an experimentally enriched lake, before and after comparisons showed lumps were not affected by large additions of P and N, even though biomass and production changed substantially. Lump regions in the two lakes with both food web manipulations and nutrient enrichment were substantially less similar pre‐ versus postenrichment than the reference lake and the lake with only nutrients added, but lump number remained relatively unchanged. Lakes that differed widely in nutrient status, trophic structure, species diversity, and area had similar size distributions. Comparisons of functional groups showed that phytoplankton had more lumps than zooplankton. In these north temperate lakes, size distribution characteristics seem to be conservative properties shaped by common regional ecosystem processes and organism patterns and not by lake‐specific factors.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4818a68d1587ee6e0e743981af090f68f0b4468

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

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: A complex adaptive systems approach (2004, background): “Outlook Looking at trait distributions in communities has had an important role in ecology, such as the distributions of body sizes (Holling 1992; Havlicek and Carpenter 2001) in communities.”
Food Webs, Body Size, and Species Abundance in Ecological Community Description (2005, background): “If Holling’s hypothesis holds generally, the distribution of body sizes in Tuesday Lake should show clumps and gaps (Havlicek and Carpenter, 2001).”
Panarchy: Theory and Application (2014, methodology): “…Cluster Analysis (SAS Institute, Inc. 1999), Bayesian Classification and Regression Tree analyses (Chipman and others 1998; Bremner and Taplin 2004), and kernel density estimation (Havlicek and Carpenter 2001) have been used to evaluate discontinuities in animal body mass distributions (Figure 2).”
Adaptive Inference for Distinguishing Credible from Incredible Patterns in Nature (2002, background): “…the existence of lumpiness in numerous systems (see, for example, Restrepo and others 1997; Allen and others 1999; Raffaelli and others 2000; Havlicek and Carpenter 2001); it includes the discovery that independent attributes of species are associated with lumpy body mass patterns (Allen…”
Cross-scale Structure and Scale Breaks in Ecosystems and Other Complex Systems (2002, background): “*Corresponding author; e-mail: allencr@clemson.edu Ecosystems (2002) 5: 315–318 DOI: 10.1007/s10021-001-0075-3 ECOSYSTEMS © 2002 Springer-Verlag 315 faelli and others 2000; Havlicek and Carpenter 2001).”