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Download fileAquatic macroinvertebrate biodiversity associated with artificial agricultural drainage ditches
journal contribution
posted on 2016-05-11, 11:07 authored by Matthew J. Hill, Richard P. Chadd, N. Morris, J.D. Swaine, Paul WoodPaul WoodAgricultural drainage ditches are ubiquitous features in lowland agricultural landscapes, built primarily to facilitate land drainage, irrigate agricultural crops and alleviate flood risk. Most drainage ditches are considered artificial waterbodies and are not typically included in routine monitoring programmes, and as a result the faunal and floral communities they support are poorly quantified. This paper characterises the aquatic macroinvertebrate diversity (alpha, beta and gamma) of agricultural drainage ditches managed by an internal drainage board in Lincolnshire, UK. The drainage ditches support very diverse macroinvertebrate communities at both the site (alpha diversity) and landscape scale (gamma diversity) with the main arterial drainage ditches supporting greater numbers of taxa when compared to smaller side ditches. Examination of the between site community heterogeneity (beta diversity) indicated that differences among ditches were high spatially and temporally. The results illustrate that both main arterial and side ditches make a unique contribution to aquatic biodiversity of the agricultural landscape. Given the need to maintain drainage ditches to support agriculture and flood defence measures, we advocate the application of principles from ‘reconciliation ecology’ to inform the future management and conservation of drainage ditches.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
HydrobiologiaPages
1 - 12Citation
HILL, M.J. ... et al, 2016. Aquatic macroinvertebrate biodiversity associated with artificial agricultural drainage ditches. Hydrobiologia, doi: 10.1007/s10750-016-2757-z, pp.1-12Publisher
Springer International Publishing (© the authors)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Publication date
2016Notes
This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10750-016-2757-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.ISSN
0018-8158eISSN
1573-5117Publisher version
Language
- en