Zooplankton body size versus taxonomy in Mediterranean wetlands: implications for aquatic ecosystem evaluation

Abstract

AbstractIntrinsic ecological characteristics of Mediterranean wetlands make them excellent sites for studying biodiversity, but these wetlands have been studied much less frequently than temperate lakes. The invertebrates that inhabit them, and zooplankton specifically, play important roles in these wetlands. We compared the ability of taxon- and size-based analyses of the zooplankton community to predict the influence of environmental variables. We sampled environmental variables and zooplankton at 7 Mediterranean wetlands in the Iberian Peninsula (southern Spain) monthly along 1 hydroperiod cycle (2009–2010). We used 3 arrays for classifying the zooplankton community: 1) species occurring in >5% of the samples, 2) coarse-level taxa easily identified by a nonexpert (large branchiopods, small branchiopods, calanoid copepods, cyclopoid copepods, and harpacticoid copepods), and 3) 4 body-size classes ( 10 mm in length). We used permutational analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) and canoni...