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Micro-benthic crustacean communities in tundra lakes of North-East European Russia

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Abstract

We studied micro-benthic copepods and cladocerans in the bottom substrates of 12 lakes in the Bol’shezemel’skaya tundra in North-East European Russia during the summer. About 30 species of Cladocera and 28 species and subspecies of Copepoda were found. The majority of the micro-crustaceans are palaearctic or northern palaearctic. But the harpacticoid fauna of the western part of the studied region had specific European features, and three species of the harpacticoid fauna in the eastern part of the region were Siberian. It is therefore a boundary territory for two zoogeographical regions, the arctic and subarctic zones. Acidophilic (Arcticocamptus arcticus (Lilljeborg 1902)) and halophilic (Microsetella norvegica (Boeck 1864)) harpacticoid species were found in the lakes of the eastern part of Bol’shezemel’skaya tundra. On basis of their way of locomotion we distinguished five ecological groups and on basis of their feeding habits four ecological groups of micro-crustaceans. Groups with a similar way of locomotion were likely distributed over the studied water bodies. Habitat (inshore versus offshore), substrate particle size and substrate hardness were of paramount importance for the species distribution.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) No. 98-04-50007-a, the international projects “Sustainable development of the Pechora region in a changing Society and Environment”—SPICE (contract EC No. ICA2-CT-2000-10018) and “Pechora River Basin Integrated System Management” (PRISM) 2003–2005. We thank our colleague Vasily I. Ponomarev for samples and data about lakes 1–8 kindly given. We wish to thank also Anna Loskutova for help in translation and Vivienne Jones for kindly checking the English of the manuscript. We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

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  1. Ural Division of Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Biology of Komi Scientific Center, 28 Kommunisticheskaya St., Syktyvkar, Komi, 167982, Russia

    Elena B. Fefilova, Olga A. Loskutova & Sergey V. Pestov

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  1. Elena B. Fefilova
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  2. Olga A. Loskutova
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  3. Sergey V. Pestov
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Correspondence to Elena B. Fefilova.

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Fefilova, E.B., Loskutova, O.A. & Pestov, S.V. Micro-benthic crustacean communities in tundra lakes of North-East European Russia. Aquat Ecol 42, 449–461 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-007-9109-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-007-9109-z

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