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Estimating benthic invertebrate production in lakes: a comparison of methods and scaling from individual taxa to the whole-lake level

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Abstract

Studies of aquatic invertebrate production have been primarily conducted at the level of individual taxa or populations. Advancing our understanding of the functioning and energy flow in aquatic ecosystems necessitates scaling-up to community and whole-lake levels, as well as integrating across benthic and pelagic habitats and across multiple trophic levels. In this paper, we compare a suite of non-cohort based methods for estimating benthic invertebrate production at subpopulation, habitat, and whole-lake levels for Sparkling Lake, WI, USA. Estimates of the overall mean benthic invertebrate production (i.e. whole-lake level) ranged from 1.9 to 5.0 g DM m−2 y−1, depending on the method. Production estimates varied widely among depths and habitats, and there was general qualitative agreement among methods with regards to differences in production among habitats. However, there were also consistent and systematic differences among methods. The size-frequency method gave the highest, while the regression model of Banse and Mosher (Ecol Monogr 50:355–379, 1980) gave the lowest production estimates. The regression model of Plante and Downing (Can J Fish Aquat Sci 46:1489–1498, 1989) had the lowest average coefficients of variation at habitat (CV = 0.17) and whole-lake (CV = 0.08) levels. At the habitat level, variance in production estimates decreased with sampling effort, with little improvement after 10–15 samples. Our study shows how different production estimates can be generated from the same field data, though aggregating estimates up to the whole-lake level does produce an averaging effect that tends to reduce variance.

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Acknowledgments

Laboratory and field assistance was provided by the following: Caitlin Kersten, Kate Abitz, Nicolas Coorough, Robyn Grayson, Katie Dosch, Lindsay Schaffner, James Tracey, Marcelle Richards, Maggie Lalor, Adam Schumaker, Nicole Hayes, Kelsey Peterson, Paul Schilke, Liz Gass, Nicole Hayes, and Shawn Devlin. Thanks to Jeff Maxted, Chris Solomon, Tony Ives, Bobbi Peckarsky, and Phil Townsend for providing comments and technical help with the manuscript. Bill Feeny assisted with figures. Special thanks to the staff of Trout Lake Station and the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research (NTL-LTER) program (DEB-0217533). Funding was provided by NSF grant DEB-0449076 (M.J. Vander Zanden) and DEB-0448682 (Y. Vadeboncoeur).

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  1. Katrina J. Butkas

    Present address: , 4477 County Rd 32, Bloomfield, NY, 14469, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 680 N. Park St., Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Katrina J. Butkas & M. Jake Vander Zanden

  2. Department of Biological Sciences 235A BH, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, 45435, USA

    Yvonne Vadeboncoeur

Authors
  1. Katrina J. Butkas
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  2. Yvonne Vadeboncoeur
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  3. M. Jake Vander Zanden
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Correspondence to M. Jake Vander Zanden.

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Butkas, K.J., Vadeboncoeur, Y. & Vander Zanden, M.J. Estimating benthic invertebrate production in lakes: a comparison of methods and scaling from individual taxa to the whole-lake level. Aquat Sci 73, 153–169 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-010-0168-1

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