Abstract
The influence of physicochemical parameters other than the nutrients load on the community structure of phyto- and zooplankton in lowland shallow lakes is still poorly understood. In this study we investigated the structure of the plankton community in Danube Delta (Romania) and the relationships with environmental variables. Among the 206 taxa observed, 33 species were dominant. Canonical Correspondence Analysis indicated that incident light, lakes depth, surface area and water conductivity were of significant importance in controlling the variation in the structure of the plankton assemblages. The resulted models from averaging regression and cross-calibration predicted the main environmental parameters and allowed the selection of phyto and zooplankton species as potential biological indicators. Weighted averaging regression and cross-calibration generated useful models for predicting the main four investigated environmental parameters, which contribute to the selection of phyto- and zooplankton species as potential biological indicators.
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Acknowledgments
The study was funded by the Swiss Enlargement Contribution; project IZERZ0 – 142165, “CyanoArchive”, in the framework of the Romanian-Swiss Research Programme and Institute of Biology Bucharest of Romanian Academy; project no. RO1567-IBB02/2013. Octavian Pacioglu was funded by the National Core Program - Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation Program, project 25 N/2019 BIODIVERS 19270103. The authors thank Stela Sofa for technical support, as well as to the team from the Ecological Station Sulina for assistance during the sampling trips. The authors would equally like to thank two anonymous reviewers that provided us very useful information and checked for scientific inconsistencies and inadvertences along the manuscript.
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
Swiss Enlargement Contribution; project IZERZ0–142165, “CyanoArchive”, in the framework of the Romanian-Swiss Research Programme and Institute of Biology Bucharest of Romanian Academy; Project no. RO1567-IBB02/2013 from the Institute of Biology Bucharest of Romanian Academy Octavian Pacioglu was funded by the National Core Program - Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation Program, project 25 N/2019 BIODIVERS 19270103.
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Larisa I. Florescu, Mirela Moldoveanu and Octavian Pacioglu contributed equally to this work to the conception, analysis and interpretation of data.
Laura Parpala contributed with Cladocera and Copepoda data and revised it critically the article.
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Mean density (cell L−1 for phyto- and individuals L−1 for zooplankton) in the 25 sampled shallow lakes (XLS 91 kb)
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Mean of physico-chemical parameters per six sampling seasons (in bold the VIF factors), as well as the density of phyto- and zooplankton dominant species (frequency > 1%) employed in statistical analysis (XLS 143 kb)
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Florescu, L.I., Moldoveanu, M., Parpală, L. et al. The plankton assemblages as potential bioindicators in the environmental conditions of Danube Delta. Biologia 77, 105–114 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11756-021-00899-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11756-021-00899-3