Human impacts mediate freshwater invertebrate community responses to and recovery from drought

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dc.contributor.authorSarremejane, Romain
dc.contributor.authorEngland, Judy
dc.contributor.authorDunbar, Mike
dc.contributor.authorBrown, Rosalind
dc.contributor.authorNaura, Marc
dc.contributor.authorStubbington, Rachel
dc.date.accessioned2024-10-14T15:17:43Z
dc.date.available2024-10-14T15:17:43Z
dc.date.freetoread2024-10-14
dc.date.issued2024-11
dc.date.pubOnline2024-09-09
dc.description.abstractDrought is an increasing risk to the biodiversity within rivers—ecosystems which are already impacted by human activities. However, the long‐term spatially replicated studies needed to generate understanding of how anthropogenic stressors alter ecological responses to drought are lacking. We studied aquatic invertebrate communities in 2500 samples collected from 179 sites on rivers emerging from England's chalk aquifer over three decades. We tested two sets of alternative hypotheses describing responses to and recovery from drought in interaction with human impacts affecting water quality, fine sediment, water temperature, channel morphology, flow and temporal change in land use. We summarized communities using taxa richness, an index indicating tolerance of anthropogenic degradation (average score per taxon, ASPT) and deviation from the average composition. Responses to drought were altered by interactions with human impacts. Poor water quality exacerbated drought‐driven reductions in taxa richness. Drought‐driven deviations from the average community composition were reduced and enhanced at sites impacted by flow augmentation (e.g. effluent releases) and flow reduction (e.g. abstraction), respectively. Human impacts altered post‐drought recovery. Increases in richness were lower at sites impacted by water abstraction and higher at sites with augmented flows, in particular as recovery trajectories extended beyond 3 years. ASPT recovered faster at sites that gained woodland compared to urban land, due to their greater recovery potential, that is, their lower drought‐driven minimum values and higher post‐drought maximum values. Synthesis and applications. We show that communities in river ecosystems exposed to human impacts—in particular poor water quality, altered flow volumes and land use change—are particularly vulnerable to drought. These results provide evidence that management actions taken to enhance water quality, regulate abstraction and restore riparian land use could promote ecological resilience to drought in groundwater‐dominated rivers such as globally rare chalk streams and other rivers of the Anthropocene, as they adapt to a future characterized by increasing climatic extremity.
dc.description.journalNameJournal of Applied Ecology
dc.description.sponsorshipDepartment for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
dc.format.extent2616-2627
dc.identifier.citationSarremejane R, England J, Dunbar M, et al., (2024) Human impacts mediate freshwater invertebrate community responses to and recovery from drought. Journal of Applied Ecology, Volume 61, Issue 11, November 2024, pp. 2616-2627
dc.identifier.eissn1365-2664
dc.identifier.elementsID553277
dc.identifier.issn0021-8901
dc.identifier.issueNo11
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14771
dc.identifier.urihttps://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/23020
dc.identifier.volumeNo61
dc.languageEnglish
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherWiley
dc.publisher.urihttps://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14771
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 Internationalen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectabstraction
dc.subjectanthropogenic impact
dc.subjectchalk stream
dc.subjectdrought
dc.subjectmacroinvertebrate
dc.subjectmultiple stressors
dc.subjectresilience
dc.subjectresistance
dc.subject41 Environmental Sciences
dc.subject31 Biological Sciences
dc.subject3103 Ecology
dc.subject15 Life on Land
dc.subject14 Life Below Water
dc.subjectEcology
dc.subject3103 Ecology
dc.subject3109 Zoology
dc.subject4104 Environmental management
dc.titleHuman impacts mediate freshwater invertebrate community responses to and recovery from drought
dc.typeArticle
dc.type.subtypeJournal Article
dcterms.dateAccepted2024-07-08

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