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The relationship of diversity and biomass in phytoplankton communities weakens when accounting for species proportions

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Abstract

The relationship between productivity (or biomass) and species diversity in ecological communities remains a hotly debated topic. While much is already known about vascular plants, little is known in other types of organisms. We used a broad and standardized database of phytoplankton samples from the Czech Republic, containing 413 samples of various types of stagnant waters to evaluate this relationship. Biomass was characterized by the total biovolume/ml, the total number of individuals/ml and cells/ml all giving similar results. All these indicators spanned over five orders of magnitude while the number of species ranged between 1 and 57. Diversity was characterized by indices of Hill’s unified notation series progressively accounting for species proportion effects. The number of species showed an asymmetric unimodal relationship with biomass. The relationship weakened when considering diversity indices including species proportions. At very low productivity values (characterized by low biomass), diversity was probably restricted by the ability of algae and cyanobacteria to survive a lack of nutrients, in high productivities, by the competition for light. Medium productivities, where maximum diversity was found, exhibited large variability of diversity values (including very low ones), suggesting that low diversity of phytoplankton samples can be caused by multitude of factors.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Brian Tlougan for correcting our English, Jaroslava Komárková and Jiří Nedoma for providing their database of cell sizes, Francesco de Bello for extremely useful comments on the manuscript and Petr Šmilauer for statistical consultation. The paper greatly benefitted from inspiring comments of the editor and two anonymous reviewers. The identification of algae and cyanobacteria for the database samples would not be possible without help and advice of many taxonomist and specialists for individual groups during the whole period of 20 years, and we are extremely grateful to all of them for this support. It is impossible to name all of them; extremely valuable advice was frequently received from Jiří Komárek, Petr Marvan and František Hindák.

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  1. Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, Branišovská 31, 370 05, České Budějovice, Czech Republic

    Olga Skácelová & Jan Lepš

  2. Institute of Entomology, Biology Centre of Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Branišovská 31, 370 05, České Budějovice, Czech Republic

    Jan Lepš

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  1. Olga Skácelová
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Correspondence to Jan Lepš.

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Skácelová, O., Lepš, J. The relationship of diversity and biomass in phytoplankton communities weakens when accounting for species proportions. Hydrobiologia 724, 67–77 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-013-1723-2

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