Microdistribution of ostracods in a heterogeneous spring fen
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the last two decades, a number of studies on distribution of ostracods in European springs has been published, most of them on regional scale, concerning Alps, Mediterranean, Scandinavia and, most recently, Western Carpathians. At this large scale, chemistry of the spring water, flow regime and local climatic conditions have been usually recognized as the main factors affecting ostracod species composition. However, only little is still known about the drivers of ostracod species assemblages in springs on finer scale. In this study, we examined the small-scale distribution of stracods in the heterogeneous calcareous spring fen Liptovská Teplička (central Slovakia) in relation to environmental variables. We found nine species of ostracods with different niche widths, from crenobionts (Cypria reptans) to ubiquists (Candona gr. negletcta). The gradient of mineral richness, significant at the large scale, was relatively short at the site, and therefore had a minor influence on the local scale. Almost all ostracod species showed strongly patchy distributions, but only few of them could be explained by the measured environmental factors. Water depth/temperature and amount of dissolved organic carbon were identified as significant factors, although they explained a relatively low percentage of the species data variance. Large part of the unexplained variability might be perhaps attributed to competition, distribution of predators or seasonality of some ostracod species, which is our next subject to study. „This contribution was supported by the research project of the Czech Science Foundation (P505/16-03881S) and Specific research of Masaryk University (MUNI/A/1325/2015).“ |
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