Integrating pigment and fatty acid profiles for enhanced estimation of seston community composition

Climate change, nutrition pollution, and land use alterations influence the primary production of lakes. While light-microscopy counting remains the standard for estimating phytoplankton community composition, its expense and time-consuming nature necessitate cost-effective alternatives for seston analysis. Furthermore, estimating the contribution of seston constituents other than primary producers, or non-algal particles, is not possible with light-microscopy counting. Biotracer approach using computational methods and chemotaxonomic biomarkers such as carotenoid pigments and fatty acids have been utilised as an alternative in seston analysis when species-level taxonomy is not required. However, a comprehensive testing of how well carotenoid and fatty acids can be utilised in estimating a wide range of seston phytoplankton communities using different estimation methods is lacking. To assess the accuracy of a suite of state-of-the-art biotracer-based computational methods, namely CHEMTA..., , , # Integrating pigment and fatty acid profiles for enhanced estimation of seston community composition

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwt9v](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwt9v)

The study contained two separate experiments.

The first experiment—named here ‘Main_experiment’—consisted of seston field samples where biomolecules, namely pigments (hereafter referred as carotenoids) and fatty acids, of the seston samples acquired from Lake Vesijärvi, Finland, were analysed and the biomolecule data was used to estimate the composition of the samples. The estimates were produced computationally in R with CHEMTAX, FASTAR, MixSIAR and QFASA utilising a published biomolecule profile source library supplemented with original additions of non-algal particle biomolecule profiles. Five different versions of the source library were tested, three with only phytoplankton; carotenoids only, fatty acids only, carotenoids and fatty acids together, and two with phytoplankton and non-algal particles...