Long-term ecosystem change in two highly degraded Lake Ontario (Canada) coastal wetlands

Abstract

Coastal wetlands are essential to the ecosystem health of the Laurentian Great Lakes (North America) watershed. Multiple anthropogenic stressors have been impacting coastal wetlands since European settlement ca. 1850, and remain a concern for wetland health as watershed development intensifies. We used paleolimnological techniques to explore temporal ecosystem dynamics over the last ~ 100 years in two highly degraded Lake Ontario coastal wetlands located in southern Ontario, Canada, using Cladocera (Branchiopoda, Crustacea) subfossil remains as paleoecological indicators. In Cootes Paradise Marsh (Hamilton, Ontario), cladoceran assemblage changes exhibited a shift in dominance from Chydorus to Bosmina, at the turn of the twentieth century. That shift likely reflected the loss of aquatic macrophytes, and corresponds to the postulated timing of the arrival of invasive carp. Despite recent remediation efforts, including attempts to exclude carp from the wetland, little ecological recovery is evident from the subfossil Cladocera assemblage. No Daphnia remains were observed in our sediment core from Cootes Paradise, in contrast to previous studies on extant zooplankton communities, which reported a large Daphnia population in the west end of the marsh in the 1940s. This could indicate that our sediment core recorded ecological changes solely in the east end of Cootes Paradise Marsh. In Jordan Harbour (Lincoln, Ontario), Bosmina were dominant throughout the sediment record, and increases in littoral cladocerans were observed in the most recent sediments, in particular the appearance of periphytic Pleuroxus taxa after ~ 2008. This suggests that some recovery of aquatic macrophyte communities occurred in response to shoreline remediation efforts. Bosmina size structure exhibited only minimal changes in both wetlands, despite known large changes in historic fish community structure. Overall, our study provides perspectives on the benefits and limitations of paleolimnology for documenting ecological change in the Laurentian Great Lakes coastal wetlands.