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A global perspective on the functional responses of stream communities to flow intermittence

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posted on 2022-03-03, 11:49 authored by Julie Crabot, Cedric P Mondy, Philippe Usseglio-Polatera, Ken M Fritz, Paul WoodPaul Wood, Michelle J Greenwood, Michael T Bogan, Elisabeth I Meyer, Thibault Datry
The current erosion of biodiversity is a major concern that threatens the ecological integrity of ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide. Due to global change, an increasing proportion of river networks are drying and changes from perennial to non-perennial flow regimes represent dramatic ecological shifts with potentially irreversible alterations of community and ecosystem dynamics. However, there is minimal understanding of how biological communities respond functionally to drying. Here, we highlight the taxonomic and functional responses of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities to flow intermittence across river networks from three continents, to test predictions from underlying trait-based conceptual theory. We found a significant breakpoint in the relationship between taxonomic and functional richness, indicating higher functional redundancy at sites with flow intermittence higher than 28%. Multiple strands of evidence, including patterns of alpha and beta diversity and functional group membership, indicated that functional redundancy did not compensate for biodiversity loss associated with increasing intermittence, contrary to received wisdom. A specific set of functional trait modalities, including small body size, short life span and high fecundity, were selected with increasing flow intermittence. These results demonstrate the functional responses of river communities to drying and suggest that on-going biodiversity reduction due to global change in drying river networks is threatening their functional integrity. These results indicate that such patterns might be common in these ecosystems, even where drying is considered a predictable disturbance. This highlights the need for the conservation of natural drying regimes of intermittent rivers to secure their ecological integrity.

Funding

H2020 European Research and Innovation action Grant Agreement no. 869226 (DRYvER)

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Ecography

Volume

44

Issue

10

Pages

1511 - 1523

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is publishd by Wiley under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY 3.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2021-07-12

Publication date

2021-09-14

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

0906-7590

eISSN

1600-0587

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Paul Wood. Deposit date: 2 March 2022

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