Discostella pseudostelligera

This species is of wide-spread occurrence and is common in the summer plankton in nutrient-rich midwestern streams and lakes (Stoermer and Yang 1969, Houk et al. 2010) and oligo- to mesotrophic lakes in Europe (Krammer and Lange-Bertalot 1991, Peeters and Ector 2017) and North America.

The taxon is reported common in lakes in Quebec (Fallu et al. 2000), in softwater lakes in Wood Buffalo National Park (Moser et al. 2004), in sediment core material from Lakes Saint-Francois and Saint-Louis in the St. Lawrence Riverway (Reavie and Smol 1998), in many habitat types in the Laurentian Great Lakes, especially Lakes Erie and Ontario (Bramburger et al. 2017, Reavie and Kireta 2015), and from inland lakes in Montana, Colorado, northwest Canada (Bahls 2021). In the Great Lakes Network National Parks, it is especially common in Grand Sable Lake in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (Edlund et al. 2011).

Environmental optima are variable for this taxon and include 40 µg/L TP and 25 µg/L Cl (Reavie and Kireta 2015), 14 µg/L TP and 10.92 µg/L SiO2 (Moser et al. 2004), and conductivity optimum of 185.4 µS/cm and suspended solids optimum of 8.3 mg/L from riverine samples (Reavie and Smol 1998).