Research
| Title： | TAXONOMIC AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY OF PLANKTONIC ROTIFERS ALONG A PHOSPHORUS GRADIENT IN THE THREE GORGES RESERVOIR, CHINA |
|---|---|
| First author： | Gu, Yuan; Cai, Qinghua; Tan, Lu; Li, Bin; Ju, Shanshan; Ye, Lin |
| Journal： | FRESENIUS ENVIRONMENTAL BULLETIN |
| Years： | 2021 |
| DOI： | |
| Abstract： | Rotifers are an important component in freshwater ecosystems because they are widely used in the monitoring and assessing of water environments. Many studies have suggested that rotifer communities are sensitive to the environmental changes. However, it remains unclear how rotifer communities respond to environmental changes from the perspective of functional traits. In this study, we investigated the responses of taxonomic and functional structure of rotifer communities to total phosphorus (TP) concentration in the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR), China. We found that the variations of rotifer community structure in the TGR were mainly due to environmental filtering for specific functional traits because the changes of taxonomic and trait structure of rotifer communities were associated in the redundancy analysis. Further analysis with generalized additive model showed that both taxonomic and functional richness had a similar unimodal relationship with TP. This is because the rotifer species had a very low niche overlap in our study and the functional and taxonomical diversity indices were strongly conelated (r = 0.958, p < 0.001). Our study investigated the taxonomic and functional structure of rotifer communities along the TP gradient in the TGR, providing useful information for effective bio-monitoring of the TGR as well as the similar water bodies. |
