Abstract:
Understanding the structural characteristics of benthic macroinvertebrate communities in Xiaoxingkai Lake and its adjacent wetlands, as well as their environmental drivers, provides critical baseline data to support evidence-based wetland conservation and restoration initiatives within the protected area. During the spring, summer, and autumn of 2023, this study collected samples from three distinct habitats within the Xiaoxingkai Lake ecosystem: the lacustrine zone, the lakeshore, and the swamp. We conducted comparative analyses of benthic macroinvertebrate community structure, biodiversity patterns, and their correlations with physicochemical water parameters across seasonal variations and habitat types. The study identified 92 benthic macroinvertebrate species spanning 3 phyla, 6 classes, 15 orders, and 39 families, dominated by Arthropoda (62 species, 67.4%), followed by Annelida (16 species, 17.4%) and Mollusca (14 species, 15.2%), with Insecta (class: Arthropoda) exhibiting the highest richness (58 species, 63.0%) and
Exopalaemon modestus consistently emerging as the dominant species across seasons. Cluster analysis revealed stronger compositional similarity between the swamp and the lakeshore compared to the lacustrine habitats, while seasonal comparisons indicated greater overlap between spring and summer assemblages. Analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) confirmed significant differences in community structure across seasons (
p = 0.047) and habitats (
p = 0.001), and redundancy analysis (RDA) delineated seasonal environmental drivers, showing that spring abundance patterns were primarily influenced by water temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), turbidity, and chlorophyll a, with water temperature driving diversity indices; summer variations were governed by chemical oxygen demand (COD), pH, and turbidity, with COD affecting diversity indices; and autumn distributions were modulated by temperature, COD, DO, and chlorophyll a, with temperature again dominating diversity indices.