Studies in the Ecology of Rivers. II. The Microflora of Rivers with Special Reference to the Algae on the River Bed1

Diatoms in river water-monitoring studies

“…(1) Direct sampling of one of the above communities, the favourite being the epilithon (Sherman & Phinney, 1971;Lange-Bertalot, 1978;Descy, 1979;Rushforth et al, 1986;Leclercq & Manquet, 1987;Sabater & Sabater, 1988;Watanabe et al, 1988. (2) Sampling of artificial substrata placed in the water, the favourite being glass slides (Geitler, 1927;Butcher, 1932;Cattaneo et al, 1975;Deniseger et al, 1986;Patrick, 1949), but plastic (Besch et al, 1972;Antoine & Benson-Evans, 1985;Engelberg, 1987), wood, stones, slices of rock (Antoine & Benson-Evans, 1984;Lay & Ward, 1987) have been used to a lesser degree. For some purposes counting has been abandoned and chlorophyll a has been used to assess biomass; also a few studies have used uptake of 1 4 C (Keithan & Lowe, 1985).…”

“…They set the scene by using the presence of indicator species for waters of differing chemical composition and essentially this has been the basis of most subsequent methods. However, they made no effort to define the various habitats in which the algae grew and the next important series of papers (Butcher, 1932(Butcher, , 1940(Butcher, , 1946 used the technique of placing glass slides in British rivers and analysing the growth on these. Unfortunately this is a highly selective technique (a feature which had already been pointed out by Geitler (1927) in studies of streams in Austria) and many diatoms capable of attachment to natural surfaces do not attach to glass.…”

The 1996 founders' lecture: Potamoplankters do it on the side

“…This was also the view of Butcher (1932), who also recognized that few species of algae actually qualified-it is a highly selective environment. Reynolds (1994b) and Reynolds & Descy (1996) have attempted to determine the attributes that pre-adapt a planktonic alga to grow in a river.…”

“…Stoyneva, 1994) concerning the recruitment of Chlorococcalean potamoplankton from benthic macrophyte growths, Reynolds & Descy (1996) concluded that most species of potamoplankton were also meroplanktonic. Butcher (1932) had said this before too: 'in streams and small rivers where there is sufficient light penetrating to the river-bed, a great many organisms in the potamoplankton are derived from the algal communities of the bottom'.…”

A quantitative study of calcareous stream and Tintenstriche algae from the Malham district, Northern England

“…Despite a considerable number of studies on the ecology of attached algae in calcareous streams (Fritsch, 1929;Butcher, 1932Butcher, , 1946Gessner, 1955;Round, 1960;Kann, 1978) little is known of the relative numbers of algae present or their distribution over the stream bed. Furthermore, no detailed studies have been made on watercourses flowing over hard limestones in the British Isles, despite their widespread occurrence.…”