3.2.2. Community structure
Nematode community structure in the experimental sediment changed over the
colonization process while the community structure in the colonizing pool was rather
stable, as revealed by MDS (Figs. 5 and 6). Detritus addition affected community
colonization until the end of the experiment and there were always large differences
between field and experimental samples during the whole study period (Fig. 6).
A formal test of experimental effects on the nematode community structure using
two-way crossed ANOSIM showed a highly significant time effect for both the global
and pair-wise tests between different times (Table 5). A treatment effect was highly
significant only between controls and detritus samples. One-way ANOSIM further
revealed that treatment effects were significant between controls and the detritus samples
after 10 days (Table 6). Dose effects were not so obvious and could only be detected on
the 60th day between L and M (Table 6) and L and H (Tables 5 and 6) dose regimes.