Main macroinvertebrate community drivers and niche properties for characteristic species in urban/rural and lotic/lentic systems

Abstract

The effect of urbanization is often reflected both in lotic and lentic habitats, through changes in diversity and structural and compositional changes in macroinvertebrate communities. In this study, we focused on macroinvertebrate assemblage in lotic and lentic ecosystems of the Krąpiel River catchment area (NW Poland) with the following aims: (1) to determine the main driver in structuring lotic and lentic macroinvertebrate communities and the factors that influence them in urban versus rural landscapes; (2) to test whether the diversity of macroinvertebrate assemblages in urban lotic/lentic ecosystems is lower than that in rural landscapes; (3) to identify characteristic macroinvertebrate species for urban and rural lotic/lentic ecosystems; to (4) determine species tolerance ranges and species optimums, with special emphasis on characteristic “urban” and “rural” species. Distance from study sites to built-up areas and conductivity were the main factors contributing to the separation of urban vs. rural habitats. For lotic sites, temperature, the percentage of built-up area, insolation, and oxygen concentration were the main factors significantly associated with changes in community composition. For lentic sites, insolation, temperature, and BOD5 were recognized as the main factors which are significantly associated with changes in community composition. The results for lentic habitats were as expected: average species richness was higher in rural than in urban habitats. The characteristic species for each of the four habitat groups included Mideopsis orbicularis for Lentic rural habitats; Hygrobates longipalpis for Lotic rural habitats; Piona sp. for Lentic urban habitats; Mideopsis crassipes for Lotic urban habitats. Hygrobates longipalpis and Piona sp. were at the opposite sides with respect to the degree of urbanization. Result of this investigation has shown that the impact of urbanization and consequently the implementation of conservation measures should be viewed separately within the lentic and lotic gradient.

Environmental factors affecting water mites (Acari: Hydrachnidia) assemblage in streams, Mangde Chhu basin, central Bhutan

“…Most water mite genera exhibited negative correlation with water parameters indicating sensitivity to pollution (Goldschmidt 2016;Savić et al 2022). Abelho et al (2021), who carried out an experiment on the effect of salinity on aquatic macroinvertebrates, also suggested that genera diversity and abundance are negatively correlated with salinity as it impacts on the osmoregulation of aquatic insects and often hypertonicity can be lethal (Griffith 2017)…”

“…Water mite are greatly influenced by water parameters and environmental factors (Stryjecki et al 2016;Savić et al 2022). Abundance of water mites is negatively influenced by water temperature and velocity (Stryjecki et al 2018), with temperature being the major factor that influences distribution of Hydrachnidia along altitudinal gradients.…”

Green landscape and macrophyte cover influence macroinvertebrate taxonomic and functional composition in urban waterbodies at multiple spatial scales

“…Many studies have already highlighted the importance of a wide range of pond types to provide heterogeneous habitats both in urban (Hassall et al 2016; Pinel-Alloul et al 2022) and rural (Biggs et al 2005réghino et al 2008a regions. Despite a generally lower local diversity than their rural counterparts (Savić et al 2022;Hassall and Anderson, 2015), urban waterbodies are also often more heterogeneous in abiotic conditions at the landscape scale, which could potentially lead to similar gamma diversity (Hill et al 2016). In that context, urban and rural ponds are considered as a model system in conservation, ecology and evolutionary biology (De Meester Approaches using both taxonomic and functional composition have been instrumental for identifying groups of taxa with uniform responses to environmental gradients, as well as keystone traits whose loss may lead to a rapid collapse of the ecosystem (McGill et al 2006;Baird et al 2008).…”