Trophic interactions and food web structure of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities in afromontane wetlands: the influence of hydroperiod

Influence of hydroperiod on aquatic food-web structure and energy production in a floodplain wetland: implications for environmental flow management

“…It is generally accepted that ecosystems with a greater species richness exhibit a more complex food-web structure (Urban 2004;O'Neill and Thorp 2014) and it follows that if species richness increases with hydroperiod in temporary water bodies, then food-web complexity should also increase with an increasing hydroperiod. However, the existence of an aquatic community relies on the presence of water, so it also stands to reason that as complete desiccation approaches, the food web will begin to collapse as grazing and predation pressure increases on increasingly space-limited resources (Dalu et al 2017;Mdidimba et al 2021) and mobile taxa depart the wetland.…”

“…Equally, there is a strong body of literature investigating effects of habitat size on food-web structure, largely in lake and stream environments (Post et al 2000;McHugh et al 2015;McIntosh et al 2018;Greig et al 2022). However, recent studies in temporary systems have indicated that in ephemeral water bodies, hydroperiod is a stronger, although possibly correlated, driver of food-web structure than is the ecosystem size per se (Schriever and Williams 2013;Dalu et al 2017;Mdidimba et al 2021).…”