Strong trophic interactions link primary producers (phytoplankton) and consumers (zooplankton) in lakes. However, the influence of such interactions on the biogeographical distribution of taxa or functional traits has never been explicitly tested. To better understand the spatial distribution of these two major aquatic groups, we related the distributions of their taxa and functional traits across boreal lakes (104 for zooplankton and 48 for phytoplankton) to a common suite of environmental and spatial factors. We directly tested the degree of coupling in their taxonomic and functional distributions across the subset of common lakes. Phytoplankton functional composition responded mainly to properties related to water quality, while zooplankton composition responded more strongly to lake morphometry. Overall, the spatial distributions of phytoplankton and zooplankton were coupled at taxonomic and functional levels but after controlling for the effect of environmental drivers (water quality and morphometry) and dispersal limitation, no residual coupling could be attributed to trophic interactions. The lack of support for the role of trophic interactions as a driver coupling the distribution of plankton communities across boreal lakes indicates that taxon-specific and functional trait driven ecological interactions do not modulate large-scale spatial patterns of phytoplankton and zooplankton in a coordinated way. Our results point to community structuring forces beyond the phytoplankton-zooplankton trophic coupling itself, and which are specific to each trophic level: fish predation for zooplankton and resources for phytoplankton.
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