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Long-term plankton community dynamics and influencing factors in a man-made shallow lake, Lake Dishui, China

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Abstract

Understanding how long-term environmental variation and biotic interaction determine biological assemblages is critical for evaluating the response of biological communities to anthropogenic and climate changes. We sampled plankton and water quality from a man-made lake monthly from 2006 to 2015 for the period from after creation to 13-year old of the lake. We used correlation, variation partitioning, multivariate autoregressive state-space models, and dynamic factor analyses to disentangle interactions of biotic and abiotic factors in regulating the dynamics of plankton size groups. We found that annual average total abundances decreased 86% for phytoplankton and 78% for zooplankton, while concentrations increased 1.8 times for total nitrogen and 2.7 times for total phosphorus during the study period. We concluded that the decline of plankton abundance was largely attributed to the predation of zooplankton on phytoplankton, fish predation on both phytoplankton and zooplankton, and linkages with the decline of water salinity, pH, and the increase of clarity. The decline of plankton abundance was apparently not resulted from long-term change in nutrient concentrations. These conclusions were further supported by that abundances of nano-phytoplankton and micro-phytoplankton oscillated in opposite direction with extremely low density of Cladocera (< 1 individual/L) during the study period. Our conclusions were also supported by the strong interactions between Rotifera and macro-phytoplankton and between nano-phytoplankton and Copepoda, as well as by the describability of the six plankton size groups in a shared trend that was opposite to the trends of water clarity and planktivorous fish stock density.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (grant number 2019M661574), and supported by Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Plant Germplasm Resources (grant numbers 17DZ2252700) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 31770222 and 32001153). We thank Prof. Catherine Riseng and Prof. Kevin Wehrly from the Institute for Fisheries research of Department of Natural Resources, University of Michigan for suggestions and comments on the manuscript. Zhu Weiju provides help for information collection and field sampling. Tao Jingjing, Sun bowei, Guo Ouyang and others from the Algae and Environment Lab of Shanghai Normal University assist in collecting and analyzing water quality samples. The senior author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from China Scholarship Council that enabled her to study at the University of Michigan.

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Zhao, K., Cao, Y., Pang, W. et al. Long-term plankton community dynamics and influencing factors in a man-made shallow lake, Lake Dishui, China. Aquat Sci 83, 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-020-00758-4

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