Do freshwater biomes have nutrient-rich soil or nutrient-poor soil?
People don’t generally talk about soil in aquatic ecosystem because it’s kind of irrelevant. Productivity in aquatic ecosystem are determined by nutrients in the water and how much light can penetrate the water. All aquatic systems accumulate humus (organic matter) at the bottom, so you could say that the “soil” is nutrient rich, but in a deep oligitrophic lake, there is very little productivity because the producers (algae) do not have access to these nutrients. In freshwater aquatic systems, deep lakes tend to have nutrient poor waters (and low productivity–these are called oligotrophic lakes) and smaller, shallower lakes have more nutrients in the water and have higher productivity (eutrophic lakes). Freshwater wetlands also have large amounts of humus, and have very high productivity. The amount of nutrients could be limited in these soils because anoxic conditions and/or acidic conditions could slow decomposition, depending on the type of wetland (for example, bogs are known to b
