Modeling food webs in Florida Everglades Marshland II

The fish community in the marshes of the Florida Everglades is subject to huge seasonal fluctuations in the amount of flooded marsh, and thus of habitat. These annual fluctuations in water level are represented by sinusoidally changing hydrology, resulting in dynamic patterns of flooded and non-flooded areas in the study area. In a previous accompanying paper we have developed a spatially explicit landscape simulation model of the lower trophic level food web that includes the small fish community, where we focus on an analysis of a baseline scenario with annual water level amplitude of 0.6 m. However, in the Everglades the fluctuations in water levels have various amplitudes, ranging from 0.2 m to 0.8 m, which have strong effects on the aquatic communities. In this paper we extend the analysis to cover several representing scenarios in which the water level fluctuation amplitudes vary between 0.2 m to 0.8 m.