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Testate amoebae as indicators of water quality and contamination in shallow lakes of the Middle and Lower Yangtze Plain

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Abstract

Testate amoebae are micro-organisms characterized by an agglutinated or autogenous shell enclosing the cytoplasm. Testate amoebae have been widely proposed as valuable bioindicators in a range of ecosystems (such as soils, peatlands and lakes). The use of testate amoebae as bioindicators of water quality in aquatic ecosystems is much less developed than for other microorganisms and previous research is geographically restricted. We investigated a large range of environmental variables and their relations to testate amoeba communities from 37 shallow lakes in the middle and lower Yangtze River Plain of China. Multiple factor analysis, redundancy analysis (RDA) and a forward-selection approach were used to explore the overall community structure and the links between the environmental variables and testate amoeba composition. Results showed that testate amoebae are widely distributed in most of the lakes despite often high levels of pollution. Our data highlight some links between water quality variables and testate amoeba communities. In particular, our results suggest that heavy metals have a role in shaping testate amoeba assemblage structure, although correlations are comparatively weak, perhaps due to lagged responses. Our results support previous suggestions that testate amoebae may be useful bioindicators in aquatic ecosystems but emphasize the need for an improved mechanistic understanding.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by 973 program (2011CB808800), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41530753, 41330103, 41502167), and the 111 project (B08030) and. RJP was supported by the Russian Scientific Fund, Grant 14-14-00891.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, School of Earth Science, China University of Geosciences, 430074, Wuhan, China

    Yangmin Qin, Jiantao Xue & Shucheng Xie

  2. State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology, China University of Geosciences, 430074, Wuhan, China

    Yangmin Qin, Jiantao Xue, Yansheng Gu & Shucheng Xie

  3. Environment, University of York, Heslington, York YO105DD, UK

    Richard Payne

  4. Department of Zoology and Ecology, Penza State University, Krasnaya str. 40, 440026, Penza, Russia

    Richard Payne

  5. State Key Laboratory of Lake Science and Environment, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Xiangdong Yang & Min Yao

  6. School of Environment and Planning, Liaocheng University, 252059, Liaocheng, China

    Min Yao

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  1. Yangmin Qin
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Correspondence to Yangmin Qin.

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Supplementary Table 1

Spearman Rank correlation coefficients (Rs) between environmental variables in this study. Rs values only shown where P < 0.05. (XLS 62 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

Environmental data of the 37 lakes in this study (DOCX 33 kb)

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Qin, Y., Payne, R., Yang, X. et al. Testate amoebae as indicators of water quality and contamination in shallow lakes of the Middle and Lower Yangtze Plain. Environ Earth Sci 75, 627 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-016-5442-7

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