Diversity and distribution patterns of benthic invertebrates along alpine gradients. A study of remote European freshwater lakes

Invertebrates inhabiting alpine water bodies are sensitive to environmental variability and lake faunal communities can therefore be important indicators of long-range airborne pollution, climate change and other human impacts. Information about the trophic structure and species composition of alpine lake ecosystems over space and time should therefore give important insights into environmental change effects.To explore the sensitivity of the faunal communities to environmental variability at local and regional scales we sampled biological and environmental variables from alpine lakes in seven dif- ferent alpine lake districts in six European mountain regions. The fauna of the lakes was mainly com-