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

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all WRC staff involved in collection of samples through the duration of this monitoring and to Mark Hamer and Keri Neilson for their support towards the zooplankton monitoring programme in the Waikato region. Comments from three anonymous reviewers helped to improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Te Aka Mātuatua - School of Science, Environmental Research Institute, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Ian C. Duggan & Deniz Özkundakci

  2. Waikato Regional Council, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Deniz Özkundakci & Bruno O. David

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  1. Ian C. Duggan
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  2. Deniz Özkundakci
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Correspondence to Ian C. Duggan.

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Duggan, I.C., Özkundakci, D. & David, B.O. Long-term zooplankton composition data reveal impacts of invasions on community composition in the Waikato lakes, New Zealand. Aquat Ecol 55, 1127–1142 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-020-09803-8

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