Determining Tipping Points and Responses of Macroinvertebrate Traits to Abiotic Factors in Support of River Management

Forio, Marie Anne Eurie; Goethals, Peter; Lock, Koen; Nguyen, Thi Hanh Tien; Damanik-Ambarita, Minar Naomi; Domínguez-Granda, Luis; Thas, Olivier

doi:10.3390/biology12040593

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 101 publications

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“…By altering the hydromorphology of stream systems in such a drastic way, habitats and the species depending on them are impacted gravely. For macroinvertebrates, for example, the number of taxa that occur within a community is highly dependent on stream velocity, and exceeding certain tipping points can be devastating to local macroinvertebrate diversity [35] and traits [36].…”

Section: Threats To Freshwater Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction of Native Submerged Macrophytes to Restore Biodiversity in Streams

Van der Cruysse,

De Cock,

Lock

et al. 2024

Plants

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Streams are biodiversity hotspots that provide numerous ecosystem services. Safeguarding this biodiversity is crucial to uphold sustainable ecosystem functioning and to ensure the continuation of these ecosystem services in the future. However, in recent decades, streams have witnessed a disproportionate decline in biodiversity compared to other ecosystems, and are currently considered among the most threatened ecosystems worldwide. This is the result of the combined effect of a multitude of stressors. For freshwater systems in general, these have been classified into five main pressures: water pollution, overexploitation, habitat degradation and destruction, alien invasive species, and hydromorphological pressures. On top of these direct stressors, the effects of global processes like environmental and climate change must be considered. The intricate and interconnected nature of various stressors affecting streams has made it challenging to formulate effective policies and management strategies. As a result, restoration efforts have not always been successful in creating a large-scale shift towards a better ecological status. In order to achieve an improved status in these systems, situation-specific management strategies tailored to specific stressor combinations may be needed. In this paper, we examine the potential of introducing native submerged macrophyte species to advance the restoration of stream ecosystems. Through successful introductions, we anticipate positive ecological outcomes, including enhanced water quality and increased biodiversity. This research is significant, as the potential success in restoring stream biodiversity not only represents progress in ecological understanding but also offers valuable insights for future restoration and management strategies for these vital ecosystems.

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Section: Threats To Freshwater Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction of Native Submerged Macrophytes to Restore Biodiversity in Streams

Van der Cruysse,

De Cock,

Lock

et al. 2024

Plants

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Headwinds to Understanding Stress Response Physiology: A Systematic Review Reveals Mismatch between Real and Simulated Marine Heatwaves

Martell,

Donner

2024

Preprint

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Laboratory experiments have long been used to guide predictions of organismal stress in response to our rapidly changing climate. However, the ability to simulate real world conditions in the laboratory can be a major barrier to prediction accuracy, creating obstacles to efforts informing ecosystem conservation and management. Capitalizing on an extensive experimental literature of coral bleaching physiology, we performed a systematic review of the literature and assembled a database to identify the methods being used to measure coral bleaching in heating experiments and assess how closely heating experiments resembled marine heatwaves (MHWs) on coral reefs. Observations of the maximum photochemical yield of Photosystem II (FV/FM), though not a direct measure of bleaching, vastly outnumbered Symbiodiniaceae density and chlorophyll (ug cm-2, pg cell-1) observations in the available literature, indicating the widespread misuse of FV/FM as a proxy for coral bleaching. Laboratory studies in our database used significantly higher maximum temperatures, degree heating times (~ 1.7 x) and heating rates (~ 7.3 x), and significantly shorter durations (~ 1.5 x) than MHWs on coral reefs. We then asked whether exposure differences between lab and reef altered the relationship between coral bleaching and heating metrics using the example of hormesis, the biphasic dose response wherein low to moderate doses elicit some benefit, while high doses are deleterious. We fit curves on the data both with and without ecologically relevant heating metrics and found hormetic curves in some response variables were altered with the exclusion of exposures that fell outside of the bounds of MHWs on coral reefs. Differences between lab exposures and real-world MHWs were large enough to alter the relationships, indicating a high likelihood of prediction error. We recommend laboratory-based studies of coral bleaching use ecologically relevant exposures to improve our predictions of the coral physiological response to our rapidly warming oceans.

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Multidecadal changes in coastal benthic species composition and ecosystem functioning occur independently of temperature‐driven community shifts

Armitage,

Burrows,

Rimmer

et al. 2024

Global Change Biology

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Rising global temperatures are often identified as the key driver impacting ecosystems and the services they provide by affecting biodiversity structure and function. A disproportionate amount of our understanding of biodiversity and function is from short‐term experimental studies and static values of biodiversity indices, lacking the ability to monitor long‐term trends and capture community dynamics. Here, we analyse a biennial dataset spanning 32 years of macroinvertebrate benthic communities and their functional response to increasing temperatures. We monitored changes in species' thermal affinities to examine warming‐related shifts by selecting their mid‐point global temperature distribution range and linking them to species' traits. We employed a novel weighted metric using Biological Trait Analysis (BTA) to gain better insights into the ecological potential of each species by incorporating species abundance and body size and selecting a subset of traits that represent five ecosystem functions: bioturbation activity, sediment stability, nutrient recycling and higher and lower trophic production. Using biodiversity indices (richness, Simpson's diversity and vulnerability) and functional indices (richness, Rao's Q and redundancy), the community structure showed no significant change over time with a narrow range of variation. However, we show shifts in species composition with warming and increases in the abundance of individuals, which altered ecosystem functioning positively and/or non‐linearly. Yet, when higher taxonomic groupings than species were excluded from the analysis, there was only a weak increase in the measured change in community‐weighted average thermal affinities, suggesting changes in ecosystem functions over time occur independently of temperature increase‐related shifts in community composition. Other environmental factors driving species composition and abundance may be more important in these subtidal macrobenthic communities. This challenges the prevailing emphasis on temperature as the primary driver of ecological response to climate change and emphasises the necessity for a comprehensive understanding of the temporal dynamics of complex systems.

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Determining Tipping Points and Responses of Macroinvertebrate Traits to Abiotic Factors in Support of River Management

Cited by 3 publications

References 101 publications

Introduction of Native Submerged Macrophytes to Restore Biodiversity in Streams

Introduction of Native Submerged Macrophytes to Restore Biodiversity in Streams

Headwinds to Understanding Stress Response Physiology: A Systematic Review Reveals Mismatch between Real and Simulated Marine Heatwaves

Multidecadal changes in coastal benthic species composition and ecosystem functioning occur independently of temperature‐driven community shifts

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