| In this project we make use of existing long-term monitoring data bases to explore patterns of biodiversity in Swedish lakes across broad spatial and temporal scales which cannot be done with traditional experimental approaches. The aims of this project are to reconstruct twenty-year time series of phytoplankton and macroinvertebrate communities to assess if biodiversity and species with high conservation value are decreasing across Swedish lakes.
The project, which will be carried out during 2011, consists of three work packages. In the first, we will determine patterns of biodiversity change at the local scale of lakes (alpha diversity), the entire region in which the lakes are embedded (gamma diversity) and the spatial turnover in community structure between lakes (beta diversity). In the second work package, we will study the ecological drivers of these biodiversity components, using environmental variables indicative of climatic change, catchment-scale processes (organic matter export) or local nutrient conditions. In the third work package we will study with emphasis the importance of two different processes, species turnover and nestedness, which can influence patterns of regional diversity through species replacements or loss, respectively.
The results obtained from these work packages help us to 1) increase our knowledge about the long-term change of aquatic organisms that fulfil important ecological roles in lakes (i.e. matter and energy flux or food web base), 2) gain a better understanding of the long-term regulation of biodiversity components in Swedish lakes, derived from these organisms, as a function of key structuring environmental variables (e.g. climate change or landuse change), and 3) provide important management and conservation information through the identification of lakes with high biodiversity values that could be useful for developing protection schemes of ecologically important but threatened aquatic organisms.
In addition to communicating the results of this project in report format, we strive for publishing the results of each work package in renowned international biodiversity/ecology journals and present them in national/international conferences.
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