Abstract
Nutrients can limit the productivity of ecosystems and control the composition of the communities of organisms that inhabit them. Humans are causing atmospheric CO2 concentrations to reach levels higher than those of the past millions of years while at the same time propagating eutrophication through the addition of nutrients to lakes and rivers. We studied the effect of elevated CO2 concentrations, nutrient addition and their interaction in a series of freshwater mesocosm experiments using a factorial design. Our results highlight the important role of CO2 in shaping phytoplankton communities and their response to nutrient addition. We found that CO2 greatly magnified the increase in phytoplankton growth caused by the increased availability of nutrients. Elevated CO2 also caused changes in phytoplankton community composition. As predicted from physiology and laboratory experiments, the taxonomic group that was most limited by current day CO2 concentrations, chlorophytes, increased in relative frequency at elevated CO2. This predictable change in community composition with changes in CO2 is not altered by changes in the availability of other nutrients.
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Acknowledgments
The Gault Mesocosm Facility was funded by Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). This work was supported by the NSERC through grants to G.F. and G.B. and by NSERC, FRQNT, McGill University (including awards funded by Lorne Trottier and Philip Carpenter) through scholarships to E.L.-D. We thank Rene (Irene) Gregory-Eaves (McGill) and her laboratory for equipment; David Maneli and the staff of the Gault Nature Reserve, Alison Derry, Beatrix Beisner and Genevieve Thibodeau (UQAM) for logistic and technical support; and the 2012 McGill Limnology class for their help with the mesocosms of the October experiment.
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Communicated by Elena Litchman.
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Low-Décarie, E., Bell, G. & Fussmann, G.F. CO2 alters community composition and response to nutrient enrichment of freshwater phytoplankton. Oecologia 177, 875–883 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3153-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3153-x