Diatoms as indicators of isolated herbaceous wetland condition in Florida, USA [An article from: Ecological Indicators]

This digital document is a journal article from Ecological Indicators, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Benthic, epiphytic, and phytoplanktonic diatoms, as well as soil and water physical-chemical parameters, were sampled from 70 small (average 0.86ha) isolated depressional herbaceous wetlands located along a gradient of human disturbance in peninsular Florida to (1) compare diatom assemblage structure between algal types; (2) develop biological indicators of wetland condition; (3) examine synecological relationships between diatom structure and environmental variables, with the ultimate goal of developing an index of biological integrity using a single assemblage. Collected diatom samples were enumerated to 250 valves and identified to species or subspecies. An assessment of wetland condition was made using a landscape-scale human disturbance score (Landscape Development Intensity index, LDI), calculated for each site using land use maps and GIS. Assemblages from both impaired and reference sites were compared using blocked multi-response permutation procedures, the percent similarity index, and visually examined using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). No ecologically significant compositional differences were found within sites. Mantel's test (Mantel's r=0.29, p