Stream macroinvertebrate communities in restored and impacted catchments respond differently to climate, land-use, and runoff over a decade

Hanh H Nguyen; Kristin Peters; Jens Kiesel; Ellen A R Welti; Svenja M Gillmann; Armin W Lorenz; Sonja C Jähnig; Peter Haase

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.172659

Stream macroinvertebrate communities in restored and impacted catchments respond differently to climate, land-use, and runoff over a decade

Sci Total Environ. 2024 Apr 22:929:172659. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.172659. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Hanh H Nguyen¹, Kristin Peters², Jens Kiesel³, Ellen A R Welti⁴, Svenja M Gillmann⁵, Armin W Lorenz⁶, Sonja C Jähnig⁷, Peter Haase⁸

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Biology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany; Department of River Ecology and Conservation, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, Germany. Electronic address: hanh.nguyen@senckenberg.de.
² Institute for Natural Resource Conservation, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany. Electronic address: kpeters@hydrology.uni-kiel.de.
³ Institute for Natural Resource Conservation, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany. Electronic address: jkiesel@hydrology.uni-kiel.de.
⁴ Conservation Ecology Center, Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, Front Royal, VA, USA.
⁵ Faculty of Biology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany; Centre for Water and Environmental Research (ZWU), University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany. Electronic address: svenja.gillmann@uni-due.de.
⁶ Faculty of Biology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany; Centre for Water and Environmental Research (ZWU), University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany. Electronic address: armin.lorenz@uni-due.de.
⁷ Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, Germany; Geography Department, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: sonja.jaehnig@igb-berlin.de.
⁸ Faculty of Biology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany; Department of River Ecology and Conservation, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, Germany; Centre for Water and Environmental Research (ZWU), University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany. Electronic address: peter.haase@senckenberg.de.

PMID: 38657809
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.172659

Abstract

Identifying which environmental drivers underlie degradation and improvements of ecological communities is a fundamental goal of ecology. Achieving this goal is a challenge due to diverse trends in both environmental conditions and ecological communities across regions, and it is constrained by the lack of long-term parallel monitoring of environmental and community data needed to study causal relationships. Here, we identify key environmental drivers using a high-resolution environmental - ecological dataset, an ensemble of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) model, and ecological models to investigate effects of climate, land-use, and runoff on the decadal trend (2012-2021) of stream macroinvertebrate communities in a restored urban catchment and an impacted catchment with mixed land-uses in Germany. The decadal trends showed decreased precipitation, increased temperature, and reduced anthropogenic land-uses, which led to opposing runoff trends - with decreased runoff in the restored catchment and increased runoff in the impacted catchment. The two catchments also varied in decadal trends of taxonomic and trait composition and metrics. The most significant improvements over time were recorded in communities of the restored catchment sites, which have become wastewater free since 2007 to 2009. Within the restored catchment sites, community metric trends were primarily explained by land-use and evaporation trends, while community composition trends were mostly associated with precipitation and runoff trends. Meanwhile, the communities in the impacted catchment did not undergo significant changes between 2012 and 2021, likely influenced by the effects of prolonged droughts following floods after 2018. The results of our study confirm the significance of restoration and land-use management in fostering long-term improvements in stream communities, while climate change remains a prodigious threat. The coupling of long-term biodiversity monitoring with concurrent sampling of relevant environmental drivers is critical for preventative and restorative management in ecology.

Keywords: Long-term ecological research; Macroinvertebrates; Multiple stressors; Restoration; SWAT+; Traits.