Species diversity and functional assessment of macroinvertebrate communities in Austrian rivers

Abstract

We applied an extensive data set from 211 locations along Austrian rivers to assess community structure and the ratios of functional feeding groups of benthic macroinvertebrates. A total of 569 taxa have been identified. At the catchment scale, the Enns, Salzach, and Traun Rivers exhibited the highest taxa richness whereas the Inn River showed the lowest richness. Beta-diversity was highest along the impounded and fragmented Enns and Drau Rivers. Consequently, high corridor diversity corresponded to a low degree of nestedness. Overall, scrapers and gathering-collectors dominated the benthic community. Further, the relationship between habitat conditions and metrics based on functional feeding groups were statistically analyzed to validate the potential of these metrics as indicators of ecosystem attributes. We examined four major ecosystem attributes: species diversity, material cycling, longitudinal material transport, and lateral material input. Multiple regression analyses for midorder rivers demonstrated that metrics were significantly related to habitat conditions. For example, the metric set indicating primary production was positively correlated with periphyton cover, dissolved oxygen, dominant sediment size, and average annual discharge. Overall, most metrics exhibited unique responses to habitat conditions, implying that they are useful proxies of ecosystem attributes. Thus, a functionbased approach based on macroinvertebrates has the potential to become an effective tool for the assessment of river ecosystems.

Substrate-specific macroinvertebrate diversity patterns following stream restoration

“…Much lower T (<20) were observed for amphibians (MCloskey and Hecnar, 1997;Tockner et al, 2006) or mammals and birds (<10, Atmar and Patterson 1993). Our results are in the range of those found in other studies of aquatic macroinvertebrates (T = 30 -40, Schmera, 2004;Yoshimura et al, 2006).…”

Benthic diatom and macroinvertebrate assemblages, a key for evaluation of river health and pollution in the Shahrood River, Iran

“…Although biotic indices based on diatom and macroinvertebrate assemblages accurately reflected variation in the environmental condition of our study river and elsewhere (Frankovich et al 2006;Hering et al 2006;Yoshimura et al 2006;Gudmundsdottir et al 2013), more research is needed to determine the true optima and tolerance levels of diatoms and macroinvertebrates in least studied tropical waters such the Shahrood River. Such information will be vital for understanding the consequences of human population growth and urbanization on lotic systems (e.g.…”

Impacts of land use and environmental factors on macroinvertebrate functional feeding groups in the Dongjiang River basin, southeast China

“…Cummins (1974) categorized five functional feeding groups (FFGs) according to the different food sources utilized by macroinvertebrates: collectorgatherers (GC), collector-filterers (FC), shredders (SH), scrapers (SC), and predators (PR). In recent years, compared with the taxonomical approach, the functional approach was reported to be more appropriate and rapid for characterizing ecosystem conditions (Cummins et al 2005;Menezes et al 2010), detecting land use change (Nautiyal & Mishra 2013), and assessing river health (Yoshimura et al 2006). Anthropogenic alteration of riparian zones and land use change are likely to override geomorphological controls on the distribution of macroinvertebrate FFGs (Maridet et al 1998).…”

“…Macroinvertebrates are key components of aquatic food webs that link organic matter and nutrient resources (e.g., leaf litter, algae, and detritus) with higher trophic levels (Yoshimura et al 2006). Cummins (1974) categorized five functional feeding groups (FFGs) according to the different food sources utilized by macroinvertebrates: collectorgatherers (GC), collector-filterers (FC), shredders (SH), scrapers (SC), and predators (PR).…”