Stream microbial communities and ecosystem functioning show complex responses to multiple stressors in wastewater

Burdon, Francis J.; Bai, Yaohui; Reyes, Marta; Tamminen, Manu; Staudacher, Philipp; Mangold, Simon; Singer, Heinz; Räsänen, Katja; Joss, Adriano; Tiegs, Scott D.; Jokela, Jukka; Eggen, Rik I.L.; Stamm, Christian

doi:10.1111/gcb.15302

Cited by 68 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 145 publications

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“…A drawback of cotton strips is that a tensiometer is required for tensile strength measurements, although such instruments are common at universities and research centers, and there are laboratories that can determine tensile strengths on a contract basis. Additional advantages are that both cotton strips and wood have been found to be sensitive to concentrations of dissolved nutrients [130,134] and other environmental stressors, including heavy metals [135], acidification [99], warming [136], and releases from wastewater treatment plants [110]. The "hump-shape problem" mentioned above for leaf litter may not be an issue for cotton strips and wood because the decomposition of these materials does not involve the feeding activity of invertebrates to the same degree as leaf litter.…”

Section: Practicability Of Organic Matter Decomposition As a Bioassessment Tool: Methods Strengths And Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anthropogenic activities generally lead to simultaneous changes in multiple environmental variables, which may have contrasting effects on aquatic communities and litter decomposition. For instance, forestry, agriculture, urbanization, industry, and mining can lead to changes in the following environmental variables, the magnitude and direction of the change depending on the type, and the extent and intensity of human activities: riparian vegetation cover and diversity, litter inputs, solar irradiation, water temperature, DO concentration, water flow, channel form, sedimentation, and nutrient concentrations [76,[106][107][108][109][110]. Some activities can also result in the input of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, heavy metals, and organic pollution, which are generally not present in streams in the absence of human activities.…”

Section: Major Moderators and Sensitivity To Environmental Changementioning

confidence: 99%

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Organic Matter Decomposition and Ecosystem Metabolism as Tools to Assess the Functional Integrity of Streams and Rivers–A Systematic Review

Ferreira

Elosegi

Tiegs

et al. 2020

Water

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Streams and rivers provide important services to humans, and therefore, their ecological integrity should be a societal goal. Although ecological integrity encompasses structural and functional integrity, stream bioassessment rarely considers ecosystem functioning. Organic matter decomposition and ecosystem metabolism are prime candidate indicators of stream functional integrity, and here we review each of these functions, the methods used for their determination, and their strengths and limitations for bioassessment. We also provide a systematic review of studies that have addressed organic matter decomposition (88 studies) and ecosystem metabolism (50 studies) for stream bioassessment since the year 2000. Most studies were conducted in temperate regions. Bioassessment based on organic matter decomposition mostly used leaf litter in coarse-mesh bags, but fine-mesh bags were also common, and cotton strips and wood were frequent in New Zealand. Ecosystem metabolism was most often based on the open-channel method and used a single-station approach. Organic matter decomposition and ecosystem metabolism performed well at detecting environmental change (≈75% studies), with performances varying between 50 and 100% depending on the type of environmental change; both functions were sensitive to restoration practices in 100% of the studies examined. Finally, we provide examples where functional tools are used to complement the assessments of stream ecological integrity. With this review, we hope to facilitate the widespread incorporation of ecosystem processes into bioassessment programs with the broader aim of more effectively managing stream and river ecosystems.

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Section: Practicability Of Organic Matter Decomposition As a Bioassessment Tool: Methods Strengths And Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Major Moderators and Sensitivity To Environmental Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Organic Matter Decomposition and Ecosystem Metabolism as Tools to Assess the Functional Integrity of Streams and Rivers–A Systematic Review

Ferreira

Elosegi

Tiegs

et al. 2020

Water

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“…Wastewater effluent is a complex mix of MPs, nutrients, and microbes (Burdon, Bai, et al, 2020). To disentangle differences in sensitivity to MPs between life stages, we exposed adult and juvenile G. fossarum to two different concentrations of a realistic MP mixture.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The technical control accounted for the carrier (methanol, MeOH) used to keep the MPs in solution for dosing; laboratory‐grade MeOH only was dosed at an equivalent concentration to that in High MP treatment (approximately 5.76 mg/L). The MP mixture (Table 1) consisted of 18 different chemicals representing different compound classes with specific modes of actions that typically occur in Swiss WW (Burdon, Bai, et al, 2020; Stamm et al., 2016). One of the compounds used was the pesticide diazinon, a known toxicant to gammarid amphipods (Mayer & Ellersieck, 1986; Nyman et al., 2014).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Size‐dependent sensitivity of stream amphipods indicates population‐level responses to chemical pollution

2021

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Global change assessments have typically ignored synthetic chemical pollution, despite the rapid increase of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and industrial chemicals in the environment. The paucity of research on the ecological effects of these micropollutants undermines our efforts to address the freshwater biodiversity crisis. Understanding the responses of individual organisms to chemical pollution should help address this knowledge gap because individual‐level effects can cascade across populations, communities, and ecosystems with devastating consequences. Inputs of treated municipal wastewater are a major source of micropollutants in receiving environments. Here, we assessed population and individual‐level influences of treated wastewater on freshwater gammarid amphipods (Gammarus spp.) in Swiss lowland streams in situ and tested effects of a micropollutant mixture on individual Gammarus fossarum using a common garden laboratory experiment. We hypothesised that population‐level effects of wastewater are mediated through asymmetric sensitivities of juvenile and adult gammarids to chemical pollutants. We expected that life‐stage specific sensitivities would reflect allometric theory relating body size to a wide range of organismal characteristics, including metabolism, growth, and mortality. At the population level (i.e. field survey), we observed greatly reduced abundances of juvenile gammarids downstream of the wastewater discharge in three of the six sites surveyed, indicating the potential for demographic effects of pollution. At the individual level in a field transplant experiment, we found that the presence of wastewater led to a steeper positive relationship between gammarid body size and leaf consumption. In the laboratory experiment, we found that micropollutants had negative effects on consumption and growth rates, but a positive effect on survival. Differences in the relationship between gammarid body size and performance were subtle across treatments, although flatter slopes in growth appear to be a consistent response to chemical pollution. Faster growth rates appeared to be connected with reduced survival, placing individuals in control treatments and/or with smaller body size at greatest risk of mortality. Notably, juvenile gammarids had faster growth rates and lower survival than adults when exposed to micropollutants. Our results demonstrate the potential for negative impacts of micropollutants in freshwater ecosystems. However, the results also show that organismal responses to chemical pollutants can be complex, whereby impacts at the individual level may act counter‐intuitively to population‐level dynamics. This highlights the need for more realistic experiments to better assess how organismal responses depend on life stage and body size, and how individual‐level effects propagate to higher levels of biological organisation. Our study shows how allometric theory can be used to examine the effects of stressors on underlying organismal biology, population demographics, and link with...

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“…Mesocosms can reduce environmental complexity while maintaining essential background conditions of natural systems and providing the inferential power of replicated experiments. Most stream-side mesocosm experiments have focused on disentangling stressor interactions in agricultural landscapes [60][61][62], but this approach can also be used to investigate urban stressors [63]. Future studies in urban streams can further utilize the advantages of mesocosm experiments to quantify stressor impacts on aquatic biota and the mechanisms underpinning potential solutions that are related to riparian vegetation (e.g., thresholds for riparian vegetation types after which the positive effect of riparian buffers are lost).…”

Section: Effects Of Forest Buffers On Stream Fish In An Urban Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forested Riparian Zones Provide Important Habitat for Fish in Urban Streams

Kupilas

Burdon

Thaulow

et al. 2021

Water

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Riparian zones form a boundary between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, with disproportionate influences on food web dynamics and ecosystem functioning in both habitats. However, riparian boundaries are frequently degraded by human activities, including urbanization, leading to direct impacts on terrestrial communities and indirect changes that are mediated through altered connectivity with adjacent aquatic ecosystems. We investigated how riparian habitat influences fish communities in an urban context. We electrofished nine urban site pairs with and without forested riparian buffers, alongside an additional 12 sites that were located throughout the river networks in the Oslo Fjord basin, Norway. Brown trout (Salmo trutta) were the dominant fish species. Riparian buffers had weak positive effects on fish densities at low to moderate levels of catchment urbanization, whereas fish were absent from highly polluted streams. Subtle shifts in fish size distributions suggested that riparian buffers play an important role in metapopulation dynamics. Stable isotopes in fish from buffered reaches indicated dietary shifts, pointing to the potential for a greater reliance on terrestrial-sourced carbon. Combining these results, we postulate that spatially-mediated ontogenetic diet shifts may be important for the persistence of brown trout in urban streams. Our results show that using a food web perspective is essential in understanding how riparian buffers can offset impacts in urban catchments.

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Stream microbial communities and ecosystem functioning show complex responses to multiple stressors in wastewater

Abstract: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Cited by 68 publications

References 145 publications

Organic Matter Decomposition and Ecosystem Metabolism as Tools to Assess the Functional Integrity of Streams and Rivers–A Systematic Review

Organic Matter Decomposition and Ecosystem Metabolism as Tools to Assess the Functional Integrity of Streams and Rivers–A Systematic Review

Size‐dependent sensitivity of stream amphipods indicates population‐level responses to chemical pollution

Forested Riparian Zones Provide Important Habitat for Fish in Urban Streams

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