A Preliminary Study of Environmental Implications of the Modern Testate Amoeba from Subalpine Peatlands in the Western Nanling Mountains:A Case Study of Daping Peatland in Hunan Province

Subalpine peatlands in Nanling Mountains play an important role in maintaining ecosystem and regional water balance in subtropical regions of South China. However, there still have no systematic investigation on the quantitative palaeoenviroment reconstructions in this area. Testate amoebae have been effectively used for paleoenvironmental proxies across a range of geographical locations. In this work, we conducted a preliminary study of the modern distribution of testate amoebae assemblage in Daping peatland from a subalpine peatland in the western Naning Mountains. Testate amoebae assemblages from 23 microsites within the peatland were investigated. Multivariate statistical analysis demonstrated that water-table depth (WTD) was the main environmental factor in influencing the testate amoeba community composition, which was consistent with other research results around the world. Accordingly, testate amoebae-based transfer functions were developed using a variety of commonly used models. Our results showed that all transfer function models performed similarly and produced similar reconstructions, however, with relatively poor performance tested by root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and coefficient of determination (r2). The poor performances of the transfer functions were likely due to the relatively small sampling area, insufficient sampling sites, and short sampling gradient of water-table depth. This study can provide a valuable data base, which can be useful for the further systematic research of the quantitative hydrological reconstructions in subalpine peatlands from subtropical regions of South China