Hydrobiologia (2006) 571:213–224 Ó Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10750-006-0241-x Primary Research Paper Freshwater ostracod assemblages and their relationship to environmental variables in waters from northeast Germany Finn A. Viehberg Institut fu¨r Geographie und Geologie, Universita¨t Greifswald, Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Str. 17a, D-17487, Greifswald, Germany Present Address: Laboratoire de pale´olimnologie et de pale´oe´cologie, Centre d’E´tudes Nordiques, Pavilion Abitibi-Price, Universite´ Laval, Sainte-Foy, Que´bec, G1K 7P4, Canada (E-mail: fi
[email protected]) Received 16 June 2005; in revised form 22 March 2006; accepted 28 April 2006; published online 13 July 2006 Key words: ostracoda, calibration dataset, canonical correspondence analysis, phenology, water temperature, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Abstract An ecological calibration dataset for freshwater ostracods from 33 localities throughout West-Pomerania (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany) was evaluated using multivariate statistical methods. A total of 47 freshwater ostracod species were identified. Nine species were rediscovered after 100 years since the last published record and Candonopsis scourfieldi and Pseudocandona sucki was recorded for the first time in the study area. Special emphasis is put on the phenology of each species to gain information on the water characteristics at the time of their last moult. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) revealed that the ecological variables such as water temperature, Ca, Mg, and lake area were statistically most significant (p < 0.005; n = 72) in explaining variation in the distribution of ostracod assemblages. In addition, a transfer function was developed for paleolimnological approaches, based on a weighted-averaging (WA) model to calculate water temperature from the relative abundances of 22 selected ostracod species.