Concordance among lacustrine communities are low and inconsistent in the conterminous United States.

Abstract

Concordance occurs when two or more biological groups are correlated to each other. Examining the degree of concordance between communities has been a central goal in ecology. However, few studies have assessed the levels of community concordance at large spatial scales. We used a dataset obtained by the National Lakes Assessment (United States Environmental Protection Agency) to evaluate whether (i) the levels of concordance between aquatic communities were higher at the continental scale than within individual ecoregions of the United States and (ii) whether the levels of concordance between phytoplankton and zooplankton were higher than those between the plankton and macroinvertebrates communities. At the continental scale, the levels of concordance between different pairs of aquatic communities were low and did not exceed those within the ecoregions. Furthermore, levels of concordance varied considerably among ecoregions. Our results suggest that interactions between aquatic communities likely determined concordance patterns; however, the expectation of higher levels of concordance between the phytoplankton and zooplankton communities than between them and the macroinvertebrates community was not supported. The consistently low and variable levels of concordance suggest that using surrogate groups is not recommendable for monitoring lakes in the United States, both at the continental and regional scales. According to our results, the prospect of using the surrogacy approach was low even for aquatic communities that are highly interactive or driven by similar environmental factors.