ABSTRACT
CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 127 Methods.................................................................................................................................................. 128
Study Site ..................................................................................................................................... 128 Data Collection and Processing ................................................................................................... 130 Data Analysis................................................................................................................................ 130
Results .................................................................................................................................................... 131 Vegetation ..................................................................................................................................... 131 Environmental Variation............................................................................................................... 131 Periphyton Biomass and TP Content........................................................................................... 132 Algal Community Composition ................................................................................................... 133
Discussion .............................................................................................................................................. 137 Applications ........................................................................................................................................... 139 Appendix ................................................................................................................................................ 140 References .............................................................................................................................................. 142
Coastal ecosystems often support a diverse benthic microalgal community that, together with associated bacteria, fungi, and macroalgae, forms prolific periphyton growths on sediments and the grasses and/or wet forest vegetation that inhabit the coastline. Particularly in the subtropics and tropics, coastal periphyton communities form the base of a productive and diverse food web both in the marsh and the adjacent offshore marine environment as tides transport both periphyton products and consumers across the marine-freshwater interface (Admiraal, 1984; Day et al., 1989). Coastal wetlands at this interface present a diversity of environmental conditions because of the strong gradients in salinity, water availability, and nutrient supply inherent in this transitional environment. A variety of habitat types result (depending on latitude), including interior freshwater forested marshes, supertidal graminoid marshes, intertidal estuarine lagoons, hypersaline pools, mangrove swamps, and grassy salt marshes. Consequently, coastal periphyton communities contain some of the most compositionally diverse algal floras in the world (de Wolf, 1982). Because algae are strongly influenced by their surrounding chemical and structural environment, they provide a useful tool for environmental monitoring in complex coastal systems (Vos and de Wolf, 1993; Sullivan, 1999; Cooper et al., 1999).
