Functional groups of phytoplankton shaping diversity of shallow lake ecosystems

Abstract

Phytoplankton of eutrophic shallow lakes are frequently dominated by one species or species of the same functional group, resulting in species-pure algal assemblages. Knowledge of the structure of these assemblages is essential to understand their functioning; therefore, species and functional diversity were investigated in five sub-types of eutrophic shallow lake. Among the sub-types, astatic saline lakes and hypertrophic ponds had type-specific assemblages dominated by SN and W0, W1 codons. The diversity of the phytoplankton in the sub-types was quite similar, except for the astatic saline lakes, which were characterised by lower values of both functional and species diversity. We found that both functional and species diversity were low when bloom-forming cyanobacteria (H1, SN functional groups) became dominant. Dominance of other groups (J, Y, LO and W1) did not coincide with decrease in species diversity. Analysis of the biovolume versus diversity relationships revealed that decrease in diversity might be expected at biovolume >20 mm3 l−1 for shallow lakes.