“…The alteration of biodiversity in urban streams has been usually assessed on structural attributes of plant and animal communities, such as the decrease in species richness and diversity (Cooper, Lake, Sabater, Melack, & Sabo, 2013;Robinson, Schuwirth, Baumgartner, & Stamm, 2014;Roy et al, 2016), and species replacement (Arnon, Avni, & Gafny, 2015;Sterling et al, 2016;Wright, 1995). However, urbanisation also disrupts ecosystem functions such as the cycling of plant litter (Lopes, Martins, Silveira, & Alves, 2015;Paul, Meyer, & Couch, 2006;Yule, Gan, Jinggut, & Lee, 2015), a key process that fundamentally links aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. From the many factors that negatively affect the processing of organic matter, imperviousness is a commonly used predictor of stream deterioration involving structural and functional components such as detritus cycling (Imberger, Walsh, & Grace, 2008).…”