Spatio-temporal Variations of Diatom Community and Their Relationship with Water Environment in Fuxian Lake

Abstract

Fuxian Lake is an important deep lake in China with trophic status generally categorized as class I. However, there exists a trend of degradation in its ecological and environmental health under the increasing impacts derived from catchment development and recent global warming. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the community composition, distribution patterns, and driving factors of lake biota. In order to uncover the spatio-temporal variations in water quality and diatom communities, a monthly survey of diatom community composition and limnological characteristics was carried out in the surface waters of three sampling sites from the south, middle, and north of the lake basin in Fuxian in 2015. A total of 166 diatom species belonging to 31 genera were identified, which was dominated by planktonic diatoms with the extirpation of Cyclotella rhomboideo-elliptica, an endemic species for Yunnan. Diatom community structure showed significant seasonal succession across the three sites, which were dominated by Fragilaria crotonensis in January and February, by Aulacoseira granulata in March, by Cyclotella ocellata and F. crotonensis in April, and by C. ocellata for other months (i.e., relative abundance of ~80%). Over the spatial scale, the distribution of the dominant diatoms displayed a high degree of similarity. Principal component analysis further showed that there existed significant difference in the diatom community structure and lake environment over the temporal scale, but no significant deviance was found across the three sites. The results of redundancy analysis and variation partitioning revealed that the key driver included meteorological and physical factors (i.e., water temperature, wind velocity, and Secchi depth), which accounted for 27.6% of the total variance in diatom community changes. In combination with the thermocline analysis, the change in lake hydrodynamics may have influenced the thickness and duration of the thermal stratification of lake water, resulting in the reorganization of the diatom community. At the same time, the lake-water nutrients and ions also exerted an important influence on community structuring, which explained the 21.2% and 9.4% of the diatom variation, respectively. Therefore, regional warming and catchment development have significantly structured the biological community and ecosystem health of Fuxian Lake. In all, measures should be taken not only to control the watershed input of pollutants but also to actively mitigate the long-term impact of climate change for the protection and ecological remediation of Fuxian Lake.