Abstract
Lake Fuxian has the largest reserves of high-quality water resources in China, and understanding its ecological health status is the basis of its environmental protection. Based on a seasonal field investigation of the plankton community, we established a planktonic index of biotic integrity (P-IBI) evaluation system to assess the lake’s ecosystem health. The biological integrity of Lake Fuxian was relatively good during winter and spring, but gradually deteriorated from summer to autumn. Areas with poor biological integrity were mainly distributed near tourist attractions along the lake’s west coast. Redundancy analysis (RDA) was performed to explore the relationships between the P-IBI, its selected indicators, and the environmental variables. Water temperature (WT), pH, ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N), and dissolved oxygen (DO) significantly influenced the P-IBI and its selected indicators. NH3-N and DO were significantly positively correlated with the P-IBI, indicating that it could be used as a water quality indicator to indirectly reflect lake biological integrity. We demonstrated that the P-IBI can effectively reflect temporal and spatial variations of biological integrity and could be used as a potential tool to evaluate Lake Fuxian ecosystem health.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the assistance of the Fuxian Lake Plateau Deep Water Lake Research Station of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for sample collecting. We sincerely express our gratitude to EditSprings (https://www.editsprings.cn/) for the expert linguistic services provided.
Funding
This work was supported by the Science and Technology Achievement Transformation Foundation of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (2021CG0013), Water Conservancy Science and Technology Program of Jiangsu Province (2021003), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31870449 and 32071575), Provincial Science and Technology Innovative Program for Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality of Jiangsu of China (BE2022422), and Jiangsu Province Scientific Research Foundation (CX (20) 2026).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. You Ge: conceptualization, investigation, methodology, software, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. Xiaohong Gu: conceptualization, data curation, supervision, writing—review and editing. Qingfei Zeng: investigation, methodology. Zhigang Mao: conceptualization, investigation, data curation, methodology, supervision, writing—review and editing. Huihui Chen: investigation, data curation, methodology, supervision. Huiting Yang: investigation, methodology.
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Ge, Y., Gu, X., Zeng, Q. et al. Development and testing of a planktonic index of biotic integrity (P-IBI) for Lake Fuxian, China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 105873–105884 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29818-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29818-6