The importance of diatom cell size in community analysis

The large variation in size and shape in diatoms is shown by morphometric measurements of 515 benthic and pelagic diatom species from the Baltic Sea area. The largest mean cell dimension (mostly the apical axis) varied between 4.2 and 653 mum, cell surface area between 55 and 344,000 mum(2), and cell volume between 21 and 14.2 X 10(6) mum(3). The shape-related index, length to width ratio, was between 1.0 and 63.3 and the shape- and size-related index, surface area to volume ratio, was between 0.02 and 3.13. Diatom community analysis by multivariate statistics is usually based on counts of a fixed number of diatom valves with species scores irrespective of cell size. This procedure underestimates the large species for two reasons. First, the importance of a species with higher cell volume is usually larger in a community. Second, larger species usually have lower abundances and their occurrence in the diatom counts is stochastic. This article shows that co-occurring small and large diatom species can respond very differently to environmental constraints. Large epiphytic diatoms responded most to macroalgal host species and small epiphytic diatoms most to environmental conditions at the sampling site. Large epilithic diatoms responded strongly to salinity, whereas small epilithic diatoms did so less clearly. The conclusion is that different scale-dependent responses are possible within one data set. The results from the test data also show that important ecological information from diatom data can be missed when the large species are neglected or underestimated.