Search results for "Water quality"
showing 10 items of 309 documents
Do the ecological drivers of lake littoral communities match and lead to congruence between organism groups?
2020
AbstractLake littoral environments are heterogeneous, and different organisms typically show specific responses to this environmental variation. We examined local environmental and spatial factors affecting lake littoral biodiversity and the structuring of assemblages of phytoplankton, zooplankton and macroinvertebrates within and among three basins of a large lake system. We explored congruence of species composition and species richness among the studied organism groups to evaluate their general indicator potential to represent spatial variation in other groups. We expected that effects of water chemistry on plankton assemblages were stronger than effects of habitat characteristics. In co…
Zooplankton abundance: A neglected key element in the evaluation of reservoir water quality
2018
Abstract Based on our results, we propose the use of zooplankton abundance (density or biomass) as an indicator to complement the information currently being used concerning the quality of water in reservoirs. Until now, the Water Framework Directive (EU) for lakes and reservoirs has not included zooplankton because the classification of the water trophic state is based on a bottom-up model: an increase in nutrients implies an increase in primary producers and, therefore, poorer water quality. The use of zooplankton has recently been claimed due to their sensitivity to environmental changes and their control over primary producers. From our work, carried out from 2006 to 2009 (summer and wi…
The Impact of Variations in the Climate on Seasonal Dynamics of Phytoplankton
2009
Phytoplankton, an assemblage of suspended, primarily autotrophic single cells and colonies, forms part of the base of the pelagic food chain in lakes. The responses of phytoplankton to anthropogenic pressures frequently provide the most visible indication of a long-term change in water quality. Several attributes related to the growth and composition of phytoplankton, such as their community structure, abundance as well as the frequency and the intensity of blooms, are included as indicators of water quality in the Water Framework Directive. The growth and seasonal succession of phytoplankton is regulated by a variety of external as well as internal factors (Reynolds et al., 1993; Reynolds,…
Influence of chlorophyllaquantification methods in ecological quality indices
2019
Chlorophyll a concentration in aquatic ecosystems is strongly related to the phytoplankton community biomass, the growth of which depends on nutrient availability. Thus, chlorophyll a concentration...
Benchmark database for fine-grained image classification of benthic macroinvertebrates
2018
Managing the water quality of freshwaters is a crucial task worldwide. One of the most used methods to biomonitor water quality is to sample benthic macroinvertebrate communities, in particular to examine the presence and proportion of certain species. This paper presents a benchmark database for automatic visual classification methods to evaluate their ability for distinguishing visually similar categories of aquatic macroinvertebrate taxa. We make publicly available a new database, containing 64 types of freshwater macroinvertebrates, ranging in number of images per category from 7 to 577. The database is divided into three datasets, varying in number of categories (64, 29, and 9 categori…
Iron operates as an important factor promoting year-round diazotrophic cyanobacteria blooms in eutrophic reservoirs in the tropics
2021
Abstract We hypothesize that iron availability plays an important role in driving phytoplankton structure and dynamics in tropical reservoir. This role has often been neglected in routine monitoring of water quality since the main focus has been addressed on macronutrients such phosphorus and nitrogen. To elucidate the potential regulation exerted by iron availability on phytoplankton, a limnological investigation was carried out in two neighboring eutrophic reservoirs in tropical China. Traditional physical and chemical variables were measured along with total and dissolved iron concentrations to explore how they could influence phytoplankton structure. Statistical analyses showed that dis…
Tracking management-related water quality alterations by phytoplankton assemblages in a tropical reservoir
2015
Water quality improvement and suppression of cyanobacterial blooms were planned in a eutrophic reservoir in southern China through ecological engineering measures from 2006 to 2011. This consisted in (i) a hydraulic resetting of inflows and outflows to increase the distance between inlet and outlet and the water residence time in the reservoir, and in (ii) the installation of floating frames hosting wetland vegetation to promote an alteration in phytoplankton composition. The environmental changes were therefore followed through the analysis of biotic responses in phytoplankton assemblages. Ecological engineering was effective in reducing phytoplankton total biomass, in re-establishing more…
Retrospective environmental biomonitoring – Mussel Watch expanded
2016
Abstract Monitoring bioavailable contaminants and determining baseline conditions in aquatic environments has become an important aspect of ecology and ecotoxicology. Since the mid-1970s and the initiation of the Mussel Watch program, this has been successfully accomplished with bivalve mollusks. These (mostly) sessile organisms reliably and proportionately record changes of a range of organic and inorganic pollutants occurring in the water, food or sediment. The great majority of studies have measured the concentration of pollutants in soft tissues and, to a much lesser extent, in whole shells or fractions thereof. Both approaches come with several drawbacks. Neither soft tissues nor whole…
Phytoplankton assemblages in a complex system of interconnected reservoirs: the role of water transport in dispersal
2017
Phytoplankton in a complex network of reservoirs for drinking water supply was sampled in the dry and flood seasons to understand the role of dispersal through hydrochory and of environmental filters in determining the phytoplankton abundance and composition. The main assumptions tested in the present study are that (i) phytoplankton structure in these waterbodies is strongly dependent on the transportation with the river waters flowing through them and (ii) the importance of this stochastic transportation is decreasing as the connectivity with the river decreases allowing environmental filters to shape phytoplankton structure. The multivariate analysis showed that although phytoplankton wa…
Dynamical model identification of population of oysters for water quality monitoring
2014
International audience; The measurements of valve activity in a population of bivalves under natural environmental conditions (16 oysters in the Bay of Arcachon, France) are used for a physiological model identification. A nonlinear auto-regressive exogenous (NARX) model is designed and tested. The model takes into account the influence of environmental conditions using measurements of the sunlight intensity, the moonlight and tide levels. A possible influence of the internal circadian/circatidal clocks is also analyzed. Through this application, it is demonstrated that the developed dynamical model can be used for estimation of the normal physiological rhythms of permanently immersed oyste…