Zooplankton in Laguna Lejía, a high-altitude Andean shallow lake of the Puna in northern Chile

Crustaceana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 86 (13-14) ◽  
pp. 1634-1643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Muñoz-Pedreros ◽  
Patricio De los Ríos ◽  
Patricia Möller

The Puna is a high altitude ecosystem of the Central Andes located in the desert plateaus above 3500 m a.s.l. that covers parts of north-eastern Chile, north-western Argentina, south-eastern Peru and mid-western Bolivia. It is characterised by the presence of endorheic basins. Laguna Lejía is an oligohaline shallow lake with alkaline pH, located in the Atacama Puna above 4000 m a.s.l. It is surrounded by volcanoes and enclosed in a secluded basin that is of great scientific interest, due to its ecological insularity. It has been designated by the government as a priority site for biodiversity conservation. The object of this study was to analyse the specific composition and the structure of the zooplankton community in this shallow, high altitude lake. In March 2012, zooplankton samples were taken for qualitative and quantitative analysis from 13 sampling stations in the lake and two adjacent pools. The bodies of water were characterised in the field using portable equipment, with the following parameters being measured: pH, water temperature, conductivity, and dissolved oxygen. The results indicate that the type of zooplankton community matches relatively well that observed in other low salinity, high Andean wetlands, although no calanoid copepods were found. The species found have been reported for high Andean zones and shallow lakes in countries bordering Chile. The absence of species with wide geographical distribution specific for low salinity, high Andean environments, is presumably due to the presence of geographical and environmental barriers that prevent colonization by those species.

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosana Sumiya Gurgel ◽  
Paulo Roberto Silva Farias ◽  
Sandro Nunes de Oliveira

The objective of this study is to expand the mapping of land use and land cover, as well as of the permanent preservation areas (PPAs), and identify land misuse areas in the PPAs in the Tailândia municipality in the state of Pará, which is part of the Amazon biome. Remote sensing techniques and geographic information systems (GIS) were used to achieve these goals. Mapping and classification for the year 2012 were made by visual interpretation of images obtained from the RapidEye satellite, which has a 5 m spatial resolution. In this work, we identified nine classes of land use and land cover. From the hydrography vectors it was possible to determinate the Permanent Preservation Areas of the bodies of water according to the environmental legislation. Analysis of misuse in the PPAs was made by crossing-checking the land use and land cover data with that of the PPAs. The results show that 53 % of the municipality (2,347.64 km²) is occupied by human activities. Livestock farming is the activity that has most increased the use of area (30 %), followed by altered vegetation (14.6 %) and palm oil (7.2 %). The PPAs have a high percentage of misuse (47.12 %), with livestock being the largest contributor, occupying 26.65 % of the PPAs, followed by altered vegetation (12.64 %) and palm oil (4.29 %). Therefore, the main objective in Tailândia is to reconcile economic activity with sustainable development. It is important to emphasize the partnerships between the government, research institutions, regulatory agencies, states departments and local communities, else it would be impossible to monitor or control an area as vast as the Amazon.


2015 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
RA. Moreira ◽  
O. Rocha ◽  
RM. Santos ◽  
R. Laudares-Silva ◽  
ES. Dias ◽  
...  

Dinoflagellates of the genus Ceratium are generally marine organisms, but rare occurrences in freshwater have been observed in Brazil. In this paper we are recording for the first time the presence of Ceratium furcoides, an invasive species, in a shallow, natural intermittent pool formed at a high-altitude at the southern end of the Iron Quadrangle, an iron-mining district of Minas Gerais State (Southeast Brazil). Samples were collected in October and November of 2010 (rainy period). The population density of this organism observed in Lagoa Seca (“Dry Pool”) was very low, at most 4 ind L–1. Mountain lakes are extremely vulnerable to atmospheric deposition of organisms, making them valuable witnesses both of the many forms of impact arising from human activities and of the extended global connections that facilitate the dispersion and introduction of new species over great distances. Studies on the population dynamics of C. furcoides in natural tropical systems are still rare and very recent to the brazilian scenario and hence the monitoring of its dynamics and the potential impact on aquatic communities of its becoming established are essential to an understanding of the process of bioinvasion by this species.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastián Palomino-Ángel ◽  
Raúl F. Vázquez ◽  
Henrietta Hampel ◽  
Jesús A. Anaya-Acevedo ◽  
Pablo V. Mosquera ◽  
...  

<p>Spatiotemporal characteristics of physical responses of lakes to external and environmental changes are still largely unknown due to the consistent lack of monitoring of water level and corresponding changes in water storage in lakes. Understanding these changes is a fundamental step in advancing regional management of natural and anthropogenic systems that depend on the water resources of lakes. As an illustrative example, we here report a case study involving lakes of the headwater topical Andes mountain range, which, despite guaranteeing water security to millions of downstream inhabitants, still remain significantly ungauged. We present a novel evaluation of the potential of Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar DInSAR techniques for the spatiotemporal analysis of patterns of water level change in lakes such as the ones comprising these ungauged high-altitude lake systems. Time series of Sentinel-1B data for the years 2017 and 2018 were used to generate continuous interferograms representing water level changes in twenty-four lakes of the Cajas National Park, Ecuador. The relation of these water level changes with climatic and topographical factors were analyzed to validate the methodology, and determine any patterns of change and response to climatic drivers. We found relatively high Pearson correlation coefficients between regional precipitation and water level change as estimated from the interferograms. Furthermore, we found an important negative relationship between water level change, as obtained from the DInSAR phase, and lake surface area. The study revealed a spatial trend of this correlation in terms of the altitude of the lakes at the basin scale; that is, lower correlation values were found in the headers of the basins, whilst higher correlation values were found at lower basin altitudes. The results of the present study demonstrate the potential of DInSAR techniques based on Sentinel-1 data for the monitoring of hydrologic changes in open water surfaces, and the possible validation of the DInSAR results with precipitation when gauged water level data is missing. These results are a basis to propose monitoring strategies in ungauged high-altitude lake systems in regions with similar data gauging constraints. Future work will encompass the integration of ongoing water level gauging for further validation of the herein depicted lake water level estimation approach.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-40
Author(s):  
Rupamjyoti Nath ◽  
Manjit Das

The increasing numbers of newspaper reports on disappearing women from the north eastern state of Assam and especially from the economically backward areas of the state in recent years deserve close attention from both researchers' points of view as well as policy-level intervention of the larger community along with the government. This study makes an attempt to operate upon the menace area through the scalpel of game theory under the light of both primary and secondary data collected from the study area. It is an attempt to outline conscious human behaviour that leads to crimes such as women trafficking and identify the parameters controlling or affecting which types of crimes can be controlled. In order to do so, different distinct entities associated with the problem have been considered as different players leading to the concluding indication of prevailing flaws in the legal system of the country along with lack of employment opportunities and mass ignorance about the problem in hand among common people as the major reasons.


2002 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. CALLISTO ◽  
F. A. R. BARBOSA ◽  
P. MORENO

The influence of Eucalyptus plantations on the structure and composition of macroinvertebrate communities associated with the aquatic fern Salvinia auriculata Aublet were investigated in a high altitude lake bordered by either secondary Atlantic forest or Eucalyptus plantations. Comparisons of the diversity of Chironomidae (Diptera, Insecta) larvae in the littoral zone between these two vegetation types showed higher diversity of larvae in waters bordered by Eucalyptus. The results demonstrated that the predominance of carnivorous taxa among the macroinvertebrate fauna appears to be the major controlling factor for limiting diversity in lake areas bordered by Eucalyptus.


Diversity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie E. Keister ◽  
Amanda K. Winans ◽  
BethElLee Herrmann

Several hypotheses of how zooplankton communities respond to coastal hypoxia have been put forward in the literature over the past few decades. We explored three of those that are focused on how zooplankton composition or biomass is affected by seasonal hypoxia using data collected over two summers in Hood Canal, a seasonally-hypoxic sub-basin of Puget Sound, Washington. We conducted hydrographic profiles and zooplankton net tows at four stations, from a region in the south that annually experiences moderate hypoxia to a region in the north where oxygen remains above hypoxic levels. The specific hypotheses tested were that low oxygen leads to: (1) increased dominance of gelatinous relative to crustacean zooplankton, (2) increased dominance of cyclopoid copepods relative to calanoid copepods, and (3) overall decreased zooplankton abundance and biomass at hypoxic sites compared to where oxygen levels are high. Additionally, we examined whether the temporal stability of community structure was decreased by hypoxia. We found evidence of a shift toward more gelatinous zooplankton and lower total zooplankton abundance and biomass at hypoxic sites, but no clear increase in the dominance of cyclopoid relative to calanoid copepods. We also found the lowest variance in community structure at the most hypoxic site, in contrast to our prediction. Hypoxia can fundamentally alter marine ecosystems, but the impacts differ among systems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 178 ◽  
pp. 115839 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menghua Wang ◽  
Wei Shi ◽  
Shohei Watanabe

1987 ◽  
Vol 44 (S1) ◽  
pp. s163-s172 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. G. Lawrence ◽  
M. H. Holoka

The toxic effects of cadmium to total community and individual species of zooplankton generally decreased as pH of the lake was experimentally lowered over a number of years by additions of acids. The biomass of crustacean zooplankton held in small impoundment systems suspended in the lake for fourteen days was reduced by 60–70% when pH was 6.7–6.8 and concentrations of Cd were maintained at 1 μg∙L−1, and by 70–80% when Cd was at 3 μg∙L−1. At a pH of 5.9, however, biomass was reduced only 20–30% in concentrations of Cd of 1 μg∙L−1, and at pH 5.6, biomass decreased by only 20% when subjected to 3 μg∙L−1 Cd. The cladocerans Bosmina longirostris and Holopedium gibberum were the most sensitive to cadmium. Cladocerans were more sensitive to cadmium than calanoid copepods, and both these groups were more sensitive then cyclopoid copepods. The decrease in toxicity of cadmium with increasing H+ may be analogous to the inhibition of uptake of cadmium by calcium.


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