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Assessment of the efficiency of river macrophytes to detect water-column nutrient levels and other environmental conditions in Irish rivers

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Abstract

Macrophytes are an essential biological element of freshwater aquatic ecosystems and are well known to reflect prevailing ecological conditions in rivers. Their use as bioindicators of nutrient status in river systems is widespread yet their reliability is hotly debated. The aim of this investigation was to assess whether macrophytes are reliable indicators of nutrient levels or better applied as indicators of other non-nutrient environmental conditions. The importance of two water-column nutrients; nitrates (N) and orthophosphates (P) were assessed in terms of their influence on macrophyte species richness and diversity in relation to other non-nutrient environmental factors using 395 river plots from Ireland. Then, in this context, the efficiency of macrophytes to detect nutrient levels was assessed by selecting two macrophyte-based water quality assessment tools; the Mean Trophic Rank (MTR) and the Predictions And Classification System for river macrophytes (LEAFPACS2). Finally, the ability of phytosociological communities within these rivers to reflect trophic levels was examined using the same two water quality assessment tools. It was shown that water-column nutrients N and P have a minor influence on macrophyte richness and no significant influence on macrophyte diversity and that MTR and LEAFPACS2 were only weakly correlated with N and P levels. It was concluded that macrophytes are sensitive to environmental changes but respond to a combination of ecological factors rather than N or P alone. Therefore, this study suggests that macrophytes are not the most efficient taxon group to apply when assessing trophic changes in isolation of other non-nutrient factors.

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Data availability

Some of the data for this research are freely available as they are part of the River Macrophyte Database held within the National Vegetation Database, National Biodiversity Data Centre, Waterford, Ireland. However, some data used in this research were shared with the authors with special permission from the owners of the data and are not freely available without direct contact with those owners.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the Irish Research Council for their funding for this research through their Employment-based Postgraduate Programme. We are also very grateful to all the data providers and the National Biodiversity Data Centre for providing the data, without which, this project would not have been possible. A special thank you to Dr Deirdre McClean and Dr Thomás Murray for their expertise and advice on the statistical analysis. Finally a special thank you to the anonymous reviewers that gave of their time to thoroughly review this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Biodiversity Data Centre, Waterford, Ireland

    Lynda Weekes & Úna FitzPatrick

  2. School of School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Munster University, Tralee, Ireland

    Lynda Weekes

  3. School of Biology and Environmental Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Mary Kelly-Quinn

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  1. Lynda Weekes
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Correspondence to Lynda Weekes.

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Weekes, L., FitzPatrick, Ú. & Kelly-Quinn, M. Assessment of the efficiency of river macrophytes to detect water-column nutrient levels and other environmental conditions in Irish rivers. Hydrobiologia 848, 2797–2814 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-021-04598-7

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