Long-term zooplankton composition data reveal impacts of invasions on community composition in the Waikato lakes, New Zealand

Data collected on zooplankton community composition over longer time periods (> 10 years) are rare. We examined among-lake spatial and temporal trends of zooplankton communities from a monitoring programme undertaken in the Waikato region, New Zealand. A total of 39 lakes were sampled over a peri...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Aquatic ecology 2021-12, Vol.55 (4), p.1127-1142
Main Authors: Duggan, Ian C., Özkundakci, Deniz, David, Bruno O.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Community composition
Composition
Ecosystems
Freshwater & Marine Ecology
Indigenous species
Introduced species
Invasive species
Lake sediments
Lakes
Life Sciences
Native organisms
Native species
Plankton
Sediment concentration
Sediment, Suspended
Sediments
Suspended sediments
Temporal variations
Trophic state
Zooplankton
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Data collected on zooplankton community composition over longer time periods (> 10 years) are rare. We examined among-lake spatial and temporal trends of zooplankton communities from a monitoring programme undertaken in the Waikato region, New Zealand. A total of 39 lakes were sampled over a period of 12 years, between 2007 and 2019, with varying degrees of temporal effort. We focussed particularly on eight lakes, considered here as ‘long-term lakes’, where samples were collected with greater regularity (including 5 with 12 years of data). Among lakes, suspended sediment concentrations and indicators of lake trophic state were inferred to be important in determining the zooplankton distributions; as this region is dominated by shallow lakes, the relative importance of suspended sediments was high. Among the long-term lakes, the greatest dissimilarities in zooplankton community composition among years were in Lake Waahi, where the Australian Boeckella symmetrica was first detected in 2012. That is, the greatest temporal changes to zooplankton composition during the study period were due to the invasion by non-indigenous species, rather than changes in trophic state or other environmental variables; non-native species commonly dominated the individual counts of species through much of 2014 and 2015, with most samples since 2016 being again dominated by native species. Following this lake, the largest and shallowest lakes in the dataset—Whangape and Waikare—exhibited the greatest variability in community composition among years.
ISSN:1386-2588
1573-5125
DOI:10.1007/s10452-020-09803-8