Ecohydrological characterization of terrestrial diatoms

Diatoms are single-celled, microscopic algae characterized by a siliceous cell wall. They live in almost all habitats containing water (e.g. lakes, streams, soils, rocks) and count among the most common algal groups in both freshwater and marine ecosystems. Their diversity and sensitivity to several environmental variables such as pH, organic pollution and acidification, have made them indispensable in water quality assessment. Because of those characteristics, recent research explored the use of terrestrial diatoms (i.e. diatoms living on soils) as tracers of water flow-paths during runoff events. Although the results were promising, further use was hampered by the lack of ecological knowledge on terrestrial diatoms and the large number of samples needed. To overcome the former, the spatial and temporal variability of diatom communities and their absolute abundances on soils were investigated and the occurrences of common soil diatoms were tested to an extensive set of environmental variables. Also, in order to reduce the number of samples, a suspended sediment sampler was explored for sampling drift diatom communities in streams during rainfall-runoff events. The results of the thesis allow to reduce the sampling effort and speed up the analysis of diatom-based hydrological tracer studies. They also indicate that many more diatoms can be used as environmental markers in hydrological tracing, that more locations can be sampled, and that the number of stream sampling sites can be increased in the future. The work thus improved the use of terrestrial diatoms as hydrological tracers.

Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Foets, Jasper
Other Authors:	Teuling, A.J.
Format:	Doctoral thesis biblioteca
Language:	English
Published:	Wageningen University
Subjects:	Life Science,
Online Access:	https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/ecohydrological-characterization-of-terrestrial-diatoms
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