Freshwater ostracods (Crustacea) and environmental variability of polygon ponds in the tundra of the Indigirka Lowland, north-east Siberia

Abstract

Freshwater ostracods (Crustacea, Ostracoda) are valuable biological indicators. In Arctic environments, their habitat conditions are barely known and the abundance and diversity of ostracods is documented only in scattered records with incomplete ecological characterization. To determine the taxonomic range of ostracod assemblages and their habitat conditions in polygon ponds in the Indigirka Lowland, north-east Siberia, we collected more than 100 living ostracod individuals per site with a plankton net (mesh size 65 µm) and an exhaustor system from 27 water bodies and studied them in the context of substrate and hydrochemical data. During the summer of 2011, a single pond site and its ostracod population was selected for special study. This first record of the ostracod fauna in the Indigirka Lowland comprises eight species and three additional taxa. Fabaeformiscandona krochini and F. groenlandica were documented for the first time in continental Siberia. Repeated sampling of a low-centre polygon pond yielded insights into the population dynamics of F. pedata. We identified air temperature and precipitation as the main external drivers of water temperatures, water levels, ion concentrations and water stable isotope composition on diurnal and seasonal scales.

• Arctic limnology
• permafrost
• patterned ground
• ecological indication
• freshwater ostracods

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted in the framework of the joint Russian–German project Polygons in Tundra Wetlands: State and Dynamics under Climate Variability in Polar Regions (Russian Foundation for Basic Research, grant no. 11-04-91332-NNIO-a, German Research Foundation grant no. HE 3622-16-1) and the Russian–German Arctic Ecological Network funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant no. 01DJ14003). We thank the field party from 2011 and 2012, Evgeny Yanyigin and Tatyana Gavrilova from the Committee of Nature Conservation in Chokurdakh for their logistical support during fieldwork. Ko van Huissteden (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) provided air pressure data from Kytalyk and a GeoEye high-resolution satellite image of the study area. Laboratory studies were supported by Ute Bastian (sedimentology, Alfred Wegener Institute), Antje Eulenburg (hydrochemistry, Alfred Wegener Institute) and Ilona Schäpan and Helga Kemnitz (scanning electron microscope imagery of ostracod valves, German Research Centre for Geosciences). Mathias Ulrich (Leipzig University, Germany) and Frank Günther (Alfred Wegener Institute) constructed maps from satellite images. The manuscript benefited from English language correction by Candace O‘Connor (University of Alaska Fairbanks). We thank Prof. David J. Horne and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments that greatly improved the manuscript. Funding for travels between Stockholm and Potsdam was provided by the E.W. Kuhlmann Foundation in Hamburg and the De Geer Fond at Stockholm University.

Notes

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