Browsing by discipline "Environmental biology"

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the relationships between phytoplankton biomass in lake Pääjärvi and environmental factors. These factors were divided into two categories: external phosphorus loading (total phosphorus, PO4 and organic phosphorus) and thermal conditions (Schmidt stability, heat volume and parent thermocline depth). The data sets at my disposal spanned the years 1994-2010 and contained phytoplankton observations, measurements of lake water temperature and measurements of phosphorus loading from the main rivers and streams flowing into lake Pääjärvi. Heat volume and stability were calculated based on the provided temperature data using a macro for Microsoft Office. The same data were used to calculate parent thermocline depth using LakeAnalyzer. The main statistical analysis performed on these data sets was Redundancy Analysis (RDA) in Canoco for Windows. The data were divided into three different periods: June, July-August and September-October. Each period was examined separately. In addition to total phytoplankton biomass, phytoplankton main groups and selected diatom and flagellate taxa were also examined in relation to the environmental factors. Heat volume proved statistically significant in June in the analysis of total biomass and the main groups and in September-October in the analysis of selected diatom taxa. A statistically significant relationship between PO4 loading and phytoplankton biomass was only detected for Peridinium sp, Rhodomonas lacustris and Mallomonas caudata for July-August. The lack of significance for phosphorus loading in the other contexts may in part be attributed to the distances between the phytoplankton sampling location and the loading measurement sites. The loading would have to drift some time in the lake to traverse these distances before it would come into contact with the measured phytoplankton. During that time, the loading would be susceptible to variations in weather or hydrological conditions as well as susceptible to uptake by other organisms. This may be the reason, or a contributing reason, why phosphorus loading was not significant for most of the contexts explored. However, since phosphorus loading was significant in at least one context, it clearly exerts some influence on the phytoplankton in Pääjärvi. The greater significance for heat volume could be attributed to the cumulative nature of the variable as well as the lack of spatial distance between the temperature sampling distance and phytoplankton sampling location.