Search

The article provides information on the factors that affect biological recovery from environmental stressors like acidification. This is an important challenge in ecology. The researchers examines zooplankton community recovery following the experimental acidification of Little Rock Lake, Wisconsin. A certain percentage of zooplankton species in the lake exhibited a recovery lag in which biological recovery to reference basin levels was delayed. They have observed that the recovery of species that thrived during acidification.

The species present within a community result from a combination of local and regional processes. We experimentally tested the importance of these two processes for lake zooplankton communities by examining the ability of additional species to persist when introduced into mesocosms in Little Rock Lake, Wisconsin, from other nearby lakes in the Northern Highland Lake District. We established a control treatment with only Little Rock Lake zooplankton and two treatments that supplemented the Little Rock communities with zooplankton from nearby lakes. Species richness declined during the 3 weeks of the experiment so that, at the end of the third week, the treatments with added zooplankton species had the same number of species as the controls; increasing the initial number of species in the community did not increase its final species richness. A plot of the mean species richness in the local habitat against the mean species richness of the regional pool fell below a 1:1 slope. This suggested that local processes were more important in structuring Little Rock Lake zooplankton communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]