Responses of different facets of aquatic plant diversity along environmental gradients in Mediterranean streams: Results from rivers of Greece

Abstract

Aquatic and riparian plants play a crucial role in the functioning of riverine ecosystems. Hence, analyzing multiple facets of plant diversity could be extremely useful for assessing the ecological integrity of lotic ecosystems. The main objective of this study was to investigate the response of multiple facets of aquatic plant diversity, such as species richness, taxonomic distinctness and compositional dissimilarity, to environmental factors (i.e. nutrient pollution and hydromorphological alteration) in 72 stream reaches of mainland Greece. We employed Generalized Additive Models to identify the variables with the highest influence and examine the response of species richness and taxonomic distinctness to environmental gradients. The relationship between compositional dissimilarity and the environment was examined with Generalized Dissimilarity Modelling. Our results supported our hypothesis that human disturbances play a considerable role in shaping macrophyte assemblages. In particular, phosphates and hydromorphological modification were significant predictors of species richness, whereas taxonomic distinctness was unaffected by indicators of anthropogenic stress but it was influenced mostly by elevation, water temperature and pH. Concerning the compositional dissimilarity, geographic distance, elevation, temperature and total inorganic nitrogen were the most important environmental parameters. Our findings suggest that human stressors, such as hydromorphological modification and nutrient enrichment, affect the plant species richness at stream reach scale, but when considering community composition or taxonomic distinctness, environmental factors associated with the natural variability (e.g. elevation, temperature and geographic distance) are of higher importance. Overall, our results emphasize the advantage of examining multiple aspects of diversity when designing conservation schemes and management plans for riparian areas.

Keywords: Aquatic biodiversity; Aquatic macrophytes; Generalized additive models; Hydromorphological modification; Mediterranean streams; Riparian corridors.