Modern diatom, cladocera, chironomid, and chrysophyte cyst assemblages as quantitative indicators for the reconstruction of past environmental conditions in the Alps. II. Nutrients

Abstract

Surface sediments from 68 small lakes in the Alps and 9 welldated sediment core samples that cover a gradient of total phosphorus (TP) concentrations of 6 to 520 ug TP l-1 were studied for diatom, chrysophyte cyst, cladocera, and chironomid assemblages. Inferencemodels for mean circulation log10 TP were developed for diatoms, chironomids, and benthic cladocera using weightedaveraging partial least squares. After screening for outliers, the final transfer functions have coefficients of determination (r2), as assessed by crossvalidation, of 0.79 (diatoms), 0.68 (chironomids), and 0.49 (benthic cladocera). Planktonic cladocera and chrysophytes show very weak relationships to TP and no TP inference models were developed for these biota. Diatoms showed the best relationship with TP, whereas the other biota all have large secondary gradients, suggesting that variables other than TP have a strong influence on their composition and abundance. Comparison with other diatom – TP inferencemodels shows that our model has high predictive power and a low root mean squared error of prediction, as assessed by crossvalidation.