Abstract
Factors that affect abundances of organisms in water bodies are influenced by extrinsic and intrinsic drivers that operate from outside and within a system. A high temporal coherence in the dynamics of abiotic parameters and biological communities among neighboring lakes evidences a strong extrinsic control operating similarly across lakes, and allows for prediction of ecosystems evolution in the context of global change and intensive land use. The Pampa region (Argentina) encompasses many shallow lakes submitted to different degrees of anthropic influence and showing contrasting alternative states. We studied an eutrophic clear and a hypertrophic turbid shallow lake during an annual cycle in order to evaluate whether they responded similarly to extrinsic factors or these were overridden by the effects of the steady state of each lake. Physical and chemical variables were highly coherent between both lakes, but accounted little for the large disparities among abundances and dynamics of microorganisms. While communities from the clear lake responded to a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic factors, the turbid lake showed a state less prone to be affected by climatic effects. We hypothesize that clear lakes would perform better as sentinels of climate change in the Pampa wetland.
Highlights
One of the central issues of ecology is to determine which factors affect the abundance and distribution of organisms (Carpenter et al 1987, Cohen et al 2003) and aquatic ecologists define functional ecology as the way to recognize the main factors that act from individual to ecosystem scales (Weisse et al 2016)
Shallow lakes are ecosystems that sustain a high biological diversity and contribute to global biogeochemical cycles, water supply, food production, among other ecosystem services (Malvárez & Bó 2004, Roland et al 2012). They are susceptible to disturbances because of their modest depth, which results in them being more responsive to variation in water supply and other natural and anthropic environmental changes (Adrian et al 2009, Beklioğlu et al 2016)
When confronted with other lakes worldwide, Pampean shallow lakes depart from most of them as they stand as extremes of the trophic-state continuum, due mainly to the high nutrient load (Diovislavi et al 2015, Fermani et al 2015)
Summary
One of the central issues of ecology is to determine which factors affect the abundance and distribution of organisms (Carpenter et al 1987, Cohen et al 2003) and aquatic ecologists define functional ecology as the way to recognize the main factors that act from individual to ecosystem scales (Weisse et al 2016). Shallow lakes are ecosystems that sustain a high biological diversity and contribute to global biogeochemical cycles, water supply, food production, among other ecosystem services (Malvárez & Bó 2004, Roland et al 2012). The drivers that directly or indirectly affect the abundance and diversity of aquatic organisms can be separated into intrinsic and extrinsic factors (Liebhold et al 2004).
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