No evidence for environmental and spatial processes in structuring phytoplankton communities

The relative importance of local and regional processes in shaping natural communities within a metacommunity context has been a focus of intense debate in recent years. Floodplain lakes provide a good system for testing this theoretical approach, as they undergo seasonal variations in physical, chemical and biological factors, as well as in their degree of connectivity. Here, we investigated how local phytoplankton communities in lakes of a tropical river-floodplain system (Araguaia River floodplain – Central Brazil) were affected by environmental and spatial (dispersal) predictors in two rainy and two dry seasons (two consecutive years). Partial redundancy analysis indicated that during the periods analyzed the effects of neither predictor were significant. Although we cannot exclude the possibility that these tropical phytoplankton communities could be regulated by stochastic events, we suggested that further studies will have greater explanatory power if they include other variables related to biotic interactions (e.g., abundance of grazers) and fine-scale environmental variation.