Planktonic Biomass Trajectories In Lake Ecosystems

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Abstract
We introduce a method, based on principal components analysis, for studying temporal changes in biomass allocation among 16 size–category compartments of lake plankton. Applied to data from a series of 12 Ontario lakes over three sampling seasons, the technique provides a simple means of visualizing shifts in patterns of biomass allocation, and it allows comparative analyses of biomass fluctuations in different lakes. Each of the primary component axes is interpretable. Furthermore, a large proportion of the variance in both the mean position of a lake and its movement along these axes is interpreted as a function of lake physicochemistry. The analysis also provides weighted scores for use in hypothesis testing which are an improvement over mean biomass values alone, because they take into account the structure of variation in the data set.

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