Environmental Drivers of Algal Metacommunity Structure in in River-Connected Lakes

Abstract

The metacommunity approach provide insights into how the biological communities are assembled along the environmental variations. The current study presents the importance of water quality on the metacommunity structure of algal communities in six, river-connected lakes using long-term (8 years) monitoring datasets. Elements of metacommunity structure were analyzed to evaluate whether water quality structured the metacommunity across biogeographic regions in the riverine ecosystem. The algal community in all lakes was found to exhibit Clementsian or quasi-Clementsian properties, indicating that the communities responded to the environmental gradient. Reciprocal averaging clearly classified the lakes into three clusters according to the geographical region in river flow (upstream, midstream, and downstream). The dispersal patterns of algal species, including Aulacoseira, Cyclotella, Stephanodiscus, and Chlamydomonas across the regions also supported the spatial-based classification results. Although conductivity, chemical oxygen demand, and biological oxygen demand were found to be important variables (loading > |0.5|) of the entire algal community assembly, temperature was a critical factor in water quality associated with community assembly in each geographical area. These results support the notion that the structure of algal communities is strongly associated with water quality, but the relative importance of variables in structuring algal communities differed by geological regions.