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. 2018 May 9;4(5):eaar4292.
doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aar4292. eCollection 2018 May.

DNA from lake sediments reveals long-term ecosystem changes after a biological invasion

Gentile Francesco Ficetola  1   2 , Jérôme Poulenard  3 , Pierre Sabatier  3 , Erwan Messager  3 , Ludovic Gielly  1 , Anouk Leloup  3 , David Etienne  3 , Jostein Bakke  4 , Emmanuel Malet  3 , Bernard Fanget  3 , Eivind Støren  4 , Jean-Louis Reyss  3 , Pierre Taberlet  1 , Fabien Arnaud  3
Affiliations

DNA from lake sediments reveals long-term ecosystem changes after a biological invasion

Gentile Francesco Ficetola et al. Sci Adv. .

Abstract

What are the long-term consequences of invasive species? After invasion, how long do ecosystems require to reach a new equilibrium? Answering these questions requires long-term, high-resolution data that are vanishingly rare. We combined the analysis of environmental DNA extracted from a lake sediment core, coprophilous fungi, and sedimentological analyses to reconstruct 600 years of ecosystem dynamics on a sub-Antarctic island and to identify the impact of invasive rabbits. Plant communities remained stable from AD 1400 until the 1940s, when the DNA of invasive rabbits was detected in sediments. Rabbit detection corresponded to abrupt changes of plant communities, with a continuous decline of a dominant plant species. Furthermore, erosion rate abruptly increased with rabbit abundance. Rabbit impacts were very fast and were stronger than the effects of climate change during the 20th century. Lake sediments can allow an integrated temporal analysis of ecosystems, revealing the impact of invasive species over time and improving our understanding of underlying mechanisms.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Lake La Poule.
Location (A), map (B), and pictures (C) of the main landscape features of the watershed. F.L., Fougères Lake; P.L., La Poule Lake ; m.a.s.l., meters above sea level.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2. Data from core POU14P1.
(A) Photograph and grain size contour plot. The color scale refers to the abundance in percentage of each grain-size class, with the less abundant in blue and the most abundant in red. (B) LOI550 (organic matter) and NCIR, (C) 210Pbex activity, (D) 137Cs activity, and (E) the age model for the upper 26 cm. MWP and BWP correspond, respectively, to maximum and beginning of nuclear weapon peak in the southern hemisphere.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3. Temporal variation of biological and sedimentological proxies.
(A) accumulation rate of spores of coprophilous fungi (Sporormiella spp.; influx), occurrence of Podospora spp. (P), and multicellular ascospores of Sporormiella (*). (B) Rabbit sedDNA. (C) sedDNA of plants (proportion). (D) Erosion rate. Dashed lines represent the abrupt changes detected by regression tree and breakpoint analysis.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4. Ecological variation of plant communities through time.
(A) Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) representing the similarity of communities from sediment samples from different periods. (B) Constrained RDA showing the relationship between the proxies of rabbit abundance (sedDNA and Sporormiella) and the abundance of different plant taxa. Taxa with negative scores along the first RDA axis have negative association with rabbit abundance.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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