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Rainfall leads to habitat homogenization and facilitates plankton dispersal in tropical semiarid lakes

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Abstract

Although some efforts have been made to understand the role of hydrology in structuring aquatic systems, little is known about how rainfall affects the relative roles of local environmental and spatial processes in structuring plankton metacommunities in tropical drylands. We hypothesize that the role played by spatial variables is more important in the dry than in the rainy season, because drought increases lakes isolation in semiarid regions. To test our hypothesis, we compared the variation in plankton structure between seasons attributable to local and spatial predictors by using variation-partitioning techniques. We used data for phytoplankton and zooplankton communities as a whole and separately by their size groups (nanoplankton, microplankton and mesoplankton) from 40 man-made lakes in northeastern Brazil. Our results showed that rainfall homogenized limnological variables and reduced total phytoplankton and nanophytoplankton beta diversity, but no effect of season was observed for microphytoplankton and zooplankton communities. Overall, in the dry season, both environmental and spatial variables were important structuring factors for the total phytoplankton, total zooplankton and microzooplankton communities, concurring with both niche- and neutral-based models. In the rainy season, spatial variables were neither important for shaping the phytoplankton nor the zooplankton metacommunities, confirming our hypothesis. The main ecological implication of our findings is that both niche- and neutral-based processes might play an important role on phytoplankton and zooplankton metacommunities dynamics in a future warmer and drier climate in tropical semiarid regions.

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank the staff of the Secretaria Estadual do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Hídricos do Rio Grande do Norte (SEMARH), especially Celso Veiga, Gláucia Costa, Maria Gorete Pereira, Selma Silva, Antônio Paiva, Josenilton Silva, and Fernando Silva for their logistical assistance during the sampling work and for providing lake data. Special thanks go to Francisco Vasconcelos and Danyhelton Dantas for field and laboratory assistance and to Fábio Roland for his enormous contribution with nutrient analyses. We thank João Nabout and Letícia Quesado for help with R statistics and Dr. Janet W. Reid (JWR Associates) for English editing and helpful comments. JB and RFM were supported by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Educational Personnel (CAPES/PNPD; Project No. 2304/2011). VLMH was partially supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq; Grant 304284/2017-3). We also acknowledge Dr. Télesphore Sime-Ngando and the two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments and suggestions to improve our manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Biociências, Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil

    Jandeson Brasil, Wanessa Sousa & José Luiz Attayde

  2. Departamento de Botânica, Laboratório de Ficologia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional, Quinta da Boa Vista s/n, São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 20940-040, Brazil

    Jandeson Brasil, Juliana B. O. Santos & Vera L. M. Huszar

  3. Instituto Federal do Tocantins, Coordenação de Apoio ao Ensino, Dianópolis, Tocantins, Brazil

    Wanessa Sousa

  4. Centro de Ciências Agrárias, Departamento de Fitotecnia e Ciências Ambientais, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Areia, Paraíba, Brazil

    Rosemberg Fernandes Menezes

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  1. Jandeson Brasil
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Brasil, J., Santos, J.B.O., Sousa, W. et al. Rainfall leads to habitat homogenization and facilitates plankton dispersal in tropical semiarid lakes. Aquat Ecol 54, 225–241 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-019-09738-9

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