European river typologies fail to capture diatom, fish, and macrophyte community composition.

Typology systems are frequently used in applied and fundamental ecology and are relevant for environmental monitoring and conservation. They aggregate ecosystems into discrete types based on biotic and abiotic variables, assuming that ecosystems of the same type are more alike than ecosystems of different types with regard to a specific property of interest. We evaluated whether this assumption is met by the Broad River Types (BRT), a recently proposed European river typology system, that classifies river segments based on abiotic variables, when it is used to group biological communities. We compiled data on the community composition of diatoms, fishes, and aquatic macrophytes throughout Europe and evaluated whether the composition is more similar in site groups with the same river type than in site groups of different river types using analysis of similarities, classification strength, typical species analysis, and the area under zeta diversity decline curves. We compared the performance of the BRT with those of four region-based typology systems, namely, Illies Freshwater Ecoregions, the Biogeographic Regions, the Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, and the Environmental Zones, as well as spatial autocorrelation (SA) classifications. All typology systems received low scores from most evaluation methods, relative to predefined thresholds and the SA classifications. The BRT often scored lowest of all typology systems. Within each typology system, community composition overlapped considerably between site groups defined by the types of the systems. The overlap tended to be the lowest for fishes and between Illies Freshwater Ecoregions. In conclusion, we found that existing broad-scale river typology systems fail to delineate site groups with distinct and compositionally homogeneous communities of diatoms, fishes, and macrophytes. A way to improve the fit between typology systems and biological communities might be to combine segment-based and region-based typology systems to simultaneously account for local environmental variation and historical distribution patterns, thus potentially improving the utility of broad-scale typology systems for freshwater biota.

Molecular evidence for distinct Antarctic lineages in the cosmopolitan terrestrial diatoms Pinnularia borealis and Hantzschia amphioxys.

Recent morphology-based studies indicate that freshwater diatom floras in the Antarctic comprise a significant share of endemics among a majority of apparently cosmopolitan species. Given the widespread (pseudo)cryptic species diversity in diatoms, we assessed the molecular divergence and temperature-dependent growth characteristics between Antarctic and non-Antarctic strains for two presumed species with a cosmopolitan distribution, namely Pinnularia borealis and Hantzschia amphioxys. Molecular phylogenies based on the plastid gene rbcL and the nuclear 28S rDNA (D1-D3 region) revealed that both taxa consist of multiple lineages, each including a distinct Antarctic lineage. A molecular clock estimates the origin of P. borealis at 35.8 (30-47) million years (Ma) ago, making this the oldest known diatom species complex. The Antarctic P. borealis lineage is estimated to have diverged 7.8 (2-15) Ma ago, after the geographical and thermal isolation of the Antarctic continent. Despite not being psychrophilic, the Antarctic lineages of P. borealis and H. amphioxys have a lower optimal growth temperature and upper lethal temperature than most lineages from more temperate regions, indicating niche differentiation. Together, this suggests that many presumed cosmopolitan Antarctic diatom species are in fact species complexes, possibly containing Antarctic endemics with low temperature preferences.