Community Ecology
Diversity and structure of fish communities in the large lakes of the Alps
Fish communities in large deep lakes around the Alps are of major ecological, commercial, conservation and recreational value. They are however exposed to many anthropogenic stressors and change rapidly. To identify driving forces, quantitative fish community data is crucially needed. Generating such baseline data of very high quality is the first goal of our project. We designed methods for a full quantitative sampling design and applied them to ten small, medium and one large sized lakes in 2010 and 2011. Twelve medium to very large lakes should follow between 2012 and 2014. We apply a fully nested biodiversity sampling and assessment, whereby diversity is documented and assessed at all its fundamental levels, from individual genetic and adaptive diversity within populations to species, communities and lake ecosystems. A large state-of-the-art collection for pre-alpine fish will be established with whole fish at the Museum in Bern and digital