Implications for the use of sedimentary invertebrate communities to infer past presence of fish

Abstract

We investigated surface sediment assemblages of invertebrates from nine shallow lakes in southern Finland and assessed the relationship between invertebrate assemblages and fish status at local scale for the purpose of paleolimnological food-web studies. Invertebrate-based cluster anal- ysis separated the fish-free lakes into their own group and the results also showed a strong and statistically significant relationship between fish status and faunal sedimentary assemblages. The present results from the local data set indicate good potential for developing quantita- tive invertebrate-based paleolimnological fish status models in the future. However, for the implementation of the models substantially more lakes with different fish status need to be examined that the effect of fish preda- tion on invertebratecommunities can be separated fromother limnological forcing mechanisms.