Microalgal assemblages response to water quality remediation in coastal waters of Perth, Australia

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Environmental Pollution

Volume

351

PubMed ID

38685553

Publisher

Elsevier

School

School of Science / Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research

RAS ID

71172

Funders

European Regional Development Fund

Grant Number

MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, TQ20220101

Comments

Zhou, C., Liu, D., Keesing, J., Zhao, N., Serrano, O., Masqué, P., ... & Wang, Y. (2024). Microalgal assemblages response to water quality remediation in coastal waters of Perth, Australia. Environmental Pollution, 351, 124017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2024.124017

Abstract

Nutrient reduction is an essential environmental policy for water quality remediation, but climate change can offset the ecological benefits of nutrient reduction and lead to the difficulty of environmental evaluation. Here, based on the records of three lipid microalgal biomarkers and stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in two sediment cores from the embayment of Perth, Australia, we reconstructed the microalgal biomasses (diatoms, dinoflagellates and coccolithophores) over the past century and evaluated the ecological effects of nutrient reduction on them, using Change Point Modeling (CPM) and redundancy analysis (RDA). The CPM result showed that total microalgal biomarkers increased by 25% and 51% in deep and shallow areas, respectively, due to nutrient enrichment caused by industrial wastewater in the 1950s and the causeway construction in the 1970s, and dinoflagellates were beneficiaries of eutrophication. The nutrient reduction policy since the 1980s had not decreased total microalgal biomass, and diatoms were beneficiaries of this period. RDA based on time series of sediment cores and water monitoring data revealed that the increase of sea-surface temperature and the decrease of rainfall since the 1980s may be important factors sustaining the high total microalgal biomass and increasing the degree of diatom dominance. The result also indicated that the variations of microalgal assemblages may better explain the effect of nutrient reduction rather than total microalgal biomass.

DOI

10.1016/j.envpol.2024.124017

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