Drivers restricting biodiversity in Australian saline lakes: a review

Abstract

Inland saline lakes are well known to be less biodiverse than fresh waters. In Australia, the most important driver affecting biodiversity is salinity that imposes an inverse linear relationship. However, in detailed studies across a wide salinity spectrum, the relationship is scale dependent. This is mediated in part by the range of salinity tolerated becoming broader as the maximum tolerated salinity increases. Other factors of importance sometimes include hydrology, habitat heterogeneity, season, pH and oxygen, but these are usually not easy to quantify. Even rarer is the influence of colonisation by marine organisms, which is applicable only at some sites near the coastline and the influence of ionic proportions on the presence of some species and, hence, diversity. The contribution of predation or competition on diversity, reported in some overseas salinas, is suspected but yet to be proved in Australia. The crustacean component in saline lakes is more influenced by these drivers than is most of the insect fraction.