0000000000053572
AUTHOR
Brian Hayden
From clear lakes to murky waters – tracing the functional response of high-latitude lake communities to concurrent ‘greening’ and ‘browning’
Climate change and the intensification of land use practices are causing widespread eutrophication of subarctic lakes. The implications of this rapid change for lake ecosystem function remain poorly understood. To assess how freshwater communities respond to such profound changes in their habitat and resource availability, we conducted a space-for-time analysis of food-web structure in 30 lakes situated across a temperature-productivity gradient equivalent to the predicted future climate of subarctic Europe (temperature +3 degrees C, precipitation +30% and nutrient +45 mu g L-1 total phosphorus). Along this gradient, we observed an increase in the assimilation of pelagic-derived carbon from…
Distance decay 2.0 – a global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities
AbstractUnderstanding the variation in community composition and species abundances, i.e., β-diversity, is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional turnover in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distances. We provide the first global synthesis of taxonomic and functional distance decay along spatial and environmental distance by analysing 149 datasets comprising different types of organisms and environments. We modelled an exponential distance decay for each dataset using generalized linear models and extracted r2 and slope to analyse the streng…
Environmental and biological factors are joint drivers of mercury biomagnification in subarctic lake food webs along a climate and productivity gradient
Subarctic lakes are getting warmer and more productive due to the joint effects of climate change and intensive land-use practices (e.g. forest clear-cutting and peatland ditching), processes that potentially increase leaching of peat- and soil-stored mercury into lake ecosystems. We sampled biotic communities from primary producers (algae) to top consumers (piscivorous fish), in 19 subarctic lakes situated on a latitudinal (69.0-66.5 degrees N), climatic (+3.2 degrees C temperature and +30% precipitation from north to south) and catchment land-use (pristine to intensive forestry areas) gradient. We first tested how the joint effects of climate and productivity influence mercury biomagnific…
Resource polymorphism in European whitefish: Analysis of fatty acid profiles provides more detailed evidence than traditional methods alone
Published version, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. , available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221338 Resource polymorphism—whereby ancestral generalist populations give rise to several specialised morphs along a resource gradient—is common where species colonise newly formed ecosystems. This phenomenon is particularly well documented in freshwater fish populations inhabiting postglacial lakes formed at the end of the last ice age. However, knowledge on how such differential exploitation of resources across contrasting habitats might be reflected in the biochemical compositions of diverging populations is still limited, though such patterns might be expected. Here, we aimed to assess …
Distance decay 2.0. A global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities
Caio Graco-Roza was funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), the Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ) and the Ella and Georg Erhnrooth Foundation; Jan Altman by research grants INTER-EXCELLENCE LTAUSA19137 provided by Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, 20-05840Y of the Czech Science Foundation, and long-term research development project no. RVO 67985939 of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Otso Ovaskainen was funded by Academy of Finland (grant no. 309581), Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence Funding Scheme (223257), and the European Research Council (ERC) unde…
Mercury and Amino Acid Content Relations in Northern Pike (Esox Lucius) in Subarctic Lakes Along a Climate-Productivity Gradient
Mercury is a highly toxic element for consumers, but its relation to amino acids and physiology of wild fish is not well known. The main aim of this study was to evaluate how total mercury content (THg) of northern pike (Esox lucius) is related to amino acids and potentially important environmental and biological factors along a climate-productivity gradient of ten subarctic lakes. Linear regression between THg and sixteen amino acids content [nmol mg−1 dry weight] from white dorsal muscle of pike from these lakes were tested. Lastly, a general linear model (GLM) for age-corrected THg was used to test which factors are significantly related to mercury content of pike. There was a positive r…
Interactions between invading benthivorous fish and native whitefish in subarctic lakes
SUMMARY 1. Many species are expanding their distribution towards higher latitudes and altitudes in response to climate change. These range shifts are expected to change fish community structure and alter food-web dynamics in subarctic lakes. However, the impacts of invading species on native fish and invertebrate prey communities remain understudied. 2. The trophic ecology of invasive species determines the likelihood of direct resource competition with native taxa. In Northern Europe, perch (Perca fluviatilis), a trophic generalist, and ruffe (Gymnocephalus cernuus), a benthic specialist, are expanding their distribution ranges northwards, colonising lakes inhabited by a native generalist,…
Seasonal changes in European whitefish muscle and invertebrate prey fatty acid composition in a subarctic lake
Ambient light and temperature show extreme seasonal variation in subarctic lakes due to the midnight sun period in summer and cold polar night period in winter. These changes have clear impacts on fish feeding and reproduction cycles, potentially affecting the fatty acid (FA) composition of muscle. Despite extensive research into fish FA over recent decades, we know little about intra‐annual changes of fish FA profile and content. We studied intra‐annual changes in the FA profile (mol%) and content (mg g‐1 dry weight) of sexually mature European whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus) muscle in a large and deep subarctic lake located in northern Fennoscandia. We collected fish, zooplankton, and ben…
Increasing temperature and productivity change biomass, trophic pyramids and community‐level omega‐3 fatty acid content in subarctic lake food webs
Climate change in the Arctic is outpacing the global average and land-use is intensifying due to exploitation of previously inaccessible or unprofitable natural resources. A comprehensive understanding of how the joint effects of changing climate and productivity modify lake food web structure, biomass, trophic pyramid shape and abundance of physiologically essential biomolecules (omega-3 fatty acids) in the biotic community is lacking. We conducted a space-for-time study in 20 subarctic lakes spanning a climatic (+3.2 degrees C and precipitation: +30%) and chemical (dissolved organic carbon: +10 mg/L, total phosphorus: +45 mu g/L and total nitrogen: +1,000 mu g/L) gradient to test how temp…