THE RELATIONSHIP IN LAKE COMMUNITIES BETWEEN PRIMARY PRODUCTIVITY AND SPECIES RICHNESS

By S. Dodson, S. Arnott, K. Cottingham. 2000

561 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An understanding of the relationship between species richness and productivity is crucial to understanding biodiversity in lakes. We investigated the relationship between the primary productivity of lake ecosystems and the number of species for lacustrine phytoplankton, rotifers, cladocerans, copepods, macrophytes, and fish. Our study includes two parts: (1) a survey of 33 well-studied lakes for which data on six major taxonomic groups were available; and (2) a comparison of the effects of short- and long-term whole-lake nutrient addition on primary productivity and planktonic species richness. In the survey, species richness of all six taxa showed a significant quadratic response to increased annual primary productivity ( 14 C estimate, g C-m -2 -yr -1 ) when lake area is taken into account. However, the richness-productivity relationship for phytoplankton and fish was strongly dependent on lake area. The relationship for phytoplankton, rotifers, cladocerans, copepods, and macrophytes was significantly unimodal. Species richness generally peaked at levels of primary productivity in the range of 30-300 g C-m -2 -yr -1 . For the average lake size, the highest biodiversity tended to occur in lakes with relatively low primary productivity, such as those found in the Northern Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in the upper Midwest (United States) and in the Experimental Lakes Area of Ontario (Canada). Based on short-term (3 yr) and long-term (21-24 yr) experiments, we tested whether individual lakes respond to whole-lake enrichment experiments in the manner suggested by analyses of survey data. Experimental addition of nutrients produced varied and unpredictable responses in species richness, probably due to transient dynamics and time lags. Responses to nutrient addition were taxon and lake specific. Phytoplankton showed a variety of relationships between species richness and pelagic primary productivity (PPR), depending on the history of enrichment and recovery. No significant effect of primary productivity on rotifer richness occurred in any of the experimental lakes, whereas richness of crustacean zooplankton was negatively correlated with primary productivity in both the short- and long-term experiments.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Chemistry, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d779e7793e7a5b7182d123d88b92d2a97bbd1cae

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Citations in the corpus

Scale dependence in the species-richness-productivity relationship: The role of species turnover (2004, background): “Dodson et al. (2000) found evidence for temporal scaledependence in the richness–productivity relationship for lake communities, but did not quantify how temporal turnover varied with productivity.”
Borders of Biodiversity: Life at the Edge of the World's Large Lakes (2011, background): “The idea that habitat productivity has a strong influence on species richness is deeply rooted in the ecological understanding of species diversity patterns (Rosenzweig 1992, Dodson et al. 2000).”
Using functional traits to investigate the determinants of crustacean zooplankton community structure (2013, result): “In support of this result, previous work has addressed the relation between nutrient levels (TP and TN) and zooplankton functional and taxonomic community composition (Dodson et al. 2000, Jeppesen et al. 2000, Barnett and Beisner 2007).”
EFFECTS OF BIODIVERSITY ON ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING: A CONSENSUS OF CURRENT KNOWLEDGE (2005, background): “…is often observed is a unimodal relationship (the so-called ‘‘humpbacked curve’’) in which species richness is greatest at intermediate levels of resource availability, stress, productivity, or disturbance (Grime 1973b, 1979, 2001, Connell 1978, Huston 1979, 1994, Sousa 1979, Dodson et al. 2000).”
Community assembly: when should history matter? (2003, background): “This result may help to explain previous discrepancies in patterns of the productivity-diversity relationship where the pattern is typically unimodal at local scales(e.g., Rosenzweig 1995; Dodson et al. 2000; Mittelbach et al. 2001), but increasing at larger spatial scales (Currie and Paquin 1987; C”
CYCLIC ASSEMBLY TRAJECTORIES AND SCALE‐DEPENDENT PRODUCTIVITY–DIVERSITY RELATIONSHIPS (2004, background): “…work to date on the effects of productivity on diversity has centered on the local scale (within sites or communities) where populations of species interact and productivity–diversity patterns are commonly unimodal (Leibold 1999, Dodson et al. 2000, Mittelbach et al. 2001, Chase and Leibold 2002).”
MULTI‐GROUP BIODIVERSITY IN SHALLOW LAKES ALONG GRADIENTS OF PHOSPHORUS AND WATER PLANT COVER (2005, background): “Mainly based on the work of Leibold (1999) and Dodson et al. (2000), they stated that hump-shaped patterns were well represented in aquatic systems.”
COASTAL DIATOM–ENVIRONMENT RELATIONSHIPS FROM THE GULF OF FINLAND, BALTIC SEA 1 (2006, background): “…progress has been made in modeling diatom response to water quality parameters in freshwaters (Douglas and Smol 1995, Battarbee et al. 1997, Weckström et al. 1997, Laing and Smol 2000, Schönfelder et al. 2002), these kinds of data are relatively sparse from coastal marine environments.”
The role of habitat connectivity and landscape geometry in experimental zooplankton metacommunities (2002, background): “…to experimental treatments; (5) diverse communities are easily maintained in experimental mesocosms (Shurin 2001, M. Leibold pers. comm.); and (6) zooplankton community composition varies along environmental gradients, particularly the level of productivity (Leibold 1999, Dodson et al. 2000).”
Nutrient Cycling by Animals in Freshwater Ecosystems (2002, background): “For example, species richness and food chain length both increase with lake size, and the former is also related to productivity (Dodson et al. 2000, Post et al. 2001).”
Mechanisms, effects, and scales of dispersal in freshwater zooplankton (2004, background): “Local factors known to influence the distribution of species include lake area (Dodson 1992), chemical composition (Tessier and Horwitz 1990), the supply of limiting nutrients (Dodson et al. 2000), competition (DeMott 1989), and predator abundance (Brooks and Dodson 1965).”
An introduced invertebrate predator (Bythotrephes) reduces zooplankton species richness (2002, unknown): “Zooplankton species richness in temperate lakes is normally controlled by their location with respect to postglacial invasion corridors (Carter et al. 1980; Stemberger 1995), by lake size (Dodson 1992; Allen et al. 1999), which controls habitat availability, and by the productivity of their food bas”
Emerging global role of small lakes and ponds: little things mean a lot (2010, background): “It has recently been suggested that the global importance of any set of ecosystems is determined by the product of the amount of the biosphere they constitute and the intensity of the process of interest within them (Downing 2009). Downing (2009) also explored ways of “scaling-up” measurements made ”