Comparing biological classifications of freshwater phytoplankton: a case study from South China

The use of ecological classification systems is becoming more and more widely used when studying phytoplankton. Grouping phytoplankton species into ecologically coherent groups allow to reduce redundancy and in this way, to handle a minor number of biological variables when investigating the ecological status of aquatic ecosystems. Three ecological classifications are mostly used when freshwater phytoplankton is studied: functional groups or coda, morpho-functional groups (MFGs) and morphology-based functional groups (MBFGs). In this study, these three ecological classifications were comparatively used along with two taxonomic classifications based on species and genera to analyse phytoplankton response to environmental variability in three sub-tropical Chinese reservoirs. Canonical correspondence analysis was performed to compare the five mentioned biological classifications. When ecological classifications were used, the percentage of variance explained in the biological groups-environmental variables was higher than that explained by the taxonomic classifications. Coda and MFGs showed a very high degree of overlapping, but since coda are associated to very detailed environmental templates, this method was more helpful in explaining phytoplankton variability in relation to environmental factors.