Modeled hydrologic metrics show links between hydrology and the functional composition of stream assemblages

Considering Fish as Recipients of Ecosystem Services Provides a Framework to Formally Link Baseline, Development, and Post-operational Monitoring Programs and Improve Aquatic Impact Assessments for Large Scale Developments

In most countries, major development projects must satisfy an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process that considers positive and negative aspects to determine if it meets environmental standards and appropriately mitigates or offsets negative impacts on the values being considered. The benefits of before-after-control-impact monitoring designs have been widely known for more than 30 years, but most development assessments fail to effectively link pre- and post-development monitoring in a meaningful way. Fish are a common component of EIA evaluation for both socioeconomic and scientific reasons. The Ecosystem Services (ES) concept was developed to describe the ecosystem attributes that benefit humans, and it offers the opportunity to develop a framework for EIA that is centred around the needs of and benefits from fish. Focusing an environmental monitoring framework on the critical needs of fish could serve to better align risk, development, and monitoring assessment processes. We define the ES that fish provide in the context of two common ES frameworks. To allow for linkages between environmental assessment and the ES concept, we describe critical ecosystem functions from a fish perspective to highlight potential monitoring targets that relate to fish abundance, diversity, health, and habitat. Finally, we suggest how this framing of a monitoring process can be used to better align aquatic monitoring programs across pre-development, development, and post-operational monitoring programs.

Quantifying flow-ecology relationships across flow regime class and ecoregions in South Carolina

The natural flow regime (i.e. magnitude, frequency, duration, timing and rate of change of flow events) is crucial for maintaining freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem services. Protecting instream flow from anthropogenic alterations first requires an understanding of the relationship between aquatic organisms and the flow regime. In this study, we used a unique framework based on random forest modeling to quantify effects of natural flow regime metrics on fish and macroinvertebrate assemblages across ecoregions and flow regime types in the state of South Carolina, USA. We found that all components of the natural flow regime affected both fish and benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages, suggesting that maintaining natural aspects of all flow regime components is critical for protecting freshwater diversity. We identified hydrologic metrics and flow regime components such as magnitude, frequency, and duration of flow events, that were associated with the greatest ecological responses for individual stream classes to help managers prioritize hydrologic and biological metrics of interest during environmental flow standard development. The response of aquatic organisms to hydrologic metrics varied across stream classifications and ecoregions, highlighting the importance of accounting for differences in flow regime and ecoregion when designing environmental flow standards. We provide a flexible framework based on statistical flow-ecology relationships that can be used to inform instream flow management and assess effects of flow alteration on riverine assemblages.

Effects of a natural precipitation gradient on fish and macroinvertebrate assemblages in coastal streams

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to increase the aridity of many regions of the world. Surface water ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to changes in the water-cycle and may suffer adverse impacts in affected regions. To enhance our understanding of how freshwater communities will respond to predicted shifts in water-cycle dynamics, we employed a space for time approach along a natural precipitation gradient on the Texas Coastal Prairie. In the spring of 2017, we conducted surveys of 10 USGS-gauged, wadeable streams spanning a semi-arid to sub-humid rainfall gradient; we measured nutrients, water chemistry, habitat characteristics, benthic macroinvertebrates, and fish communities. Fish diversity correlated positively with precipitation and was negatively correlated with conductivity. Macroinvertebrate diversity peaked within the middle of the gradient. Semi-arid fish and invertebrate communities were dominated by euryhaline and live-bearing taxa. Sub-humid communities contained environmentally sensitive trichopterans and ephemeropterans as well as a variety of predatory fish which may impose top-down controls on primary consumers. These results warn that aridification coincides with the loss of competitive and environmentally sensitive taxa which could yield less desirable community states.

Correlation Analysis between Hydrologic Flow Metrics and Benthic Macroinvertebrates Index (BMI) in the Han River Basin, South Korea

In aquatic ecosystems, flow is one of the most essential elements of aquatic species. It is necessary to explore the correlation with ecological indices for the management guidelines of aquatic ecosystems using flow because aquatic ecosystem data are limited. This study calculated the flow metrics using the flow and analyzed the correlation between the flow metrics and the ecological index. This study attempted to understand the correlation between the ecologic index and flow metrics. Flow metrics were quantified flow in various ways, depending on the size, frequency, and design of the flow. The characteristics of flow metrics were identified and the correlation with the ecological index was studied. The Pearson correlation coefficient values for 22 watersheds were compared using the flow data from 2008 to 2015 and the ecological index data from the BMI. In watersheds with high imperviousness, the Pearson correlation coefficient was negative, which indicated that the correlation in this study provides basic data for the quantitative evaluation of the river ecosystem by identifying the relationship between imperviousness and BMI. As a result, the highest Pearson correlation coefficient values of flow metrics were related to the flow coefficient of variation (MACV13-16; MHCV; MLCV).

Linking Altered Flow Regimes to Biological Condition: an Example Using Benthic Macroinvertebrates in Small Streams of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed

Regionally scaled assessments of hydrologic alteration for small streams and its effects on freshwater taxa are often inhibited by a low number of stream gages. To overcome this limitation, we paired modeled estimates of hydrologic alteration to a benthic macroinvertebrate index of biotic integrity data for 4522 stream reaches across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Using separate random-forest models, we predicted flow status (inflated, diminished, or indeterminant) for 12 published hydrologic metrics (HMs) that characterize the main components of flow regimes. We used these models to predict each HM status for each stream reach in the watershed, and linked predictions to macroinvertebrate condition samples collected from streams with drainage areas less than 200 km2. Flow alteration was calculated as the number of HMs with inflated or diminished status and ranged from 0 (no HM inflated or diminished) to 12 (all 12 HMs inflated or diminished). When focused solely on the stream condition and flow-alteration relationship, degraded macroinvertebrate condition was, depending on the number of HMs used, 3.8-4.7 times more likely in a flow-altered site; this likelihood was over twofold higher in the urban-focused dataset (8.7-10.8), and was never significant in the agriculture-focused dataset. Logistic regression analysis using the entire dataset showed for every unit increase in flow-alteration intensity, the odds of a degraded condition increased 3.7%. Our results provide an indication of whether altered streamflow is a possible driver of degraded biological conditions, information that could help managers prioritize management actions and lead to more effective restoration efforts.

Precipitation and temperature drive continental-scale patterns in stream invertebrate production

Secondary production, the growth of new heterotrophic biomass, is a key process in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems that has been carefully measured in many flowing water ecosystems. We combine structural equation modeling with the first worldwide dataset on annual secondary production of stream invertebrate communities to reveal core pathways linking air temperature and precipitation to secondary production. In the United States, where the most extensive set of secondary production estimates and covariate data were available, we show that precipitation-mediated, low-stream flow events have a strong negative effect on secondary production. At larger scales (United States, Europe, Central America, and Pacific), we demonstrate the significance of a positive two-step pathway from air to water temperature to increasing secondary production. Our results provide insights into the potential effects of climate change on secondary production and demonstrate a modeling framework that can be applied across ecosystems.

Extreme drought pushes stream invertebrate communities over functional thresholds

Functional traits are increasingly being used to predict extinction risks and range shifts under long-term climate change scenarios, but have rarely been used to study vulnerability to extreme climatic events, such as supraseasonal droughts. In streams, drought intensification can cross thresholds of habitat loss, where marginal changes in environmental conditions trigger disproportionate biotic responses. However, these thresholds have been studied only from a structural perspective, and the existence of functional nonlinearity remains unknown. We explored trends in invertebrate community functional traits along a gradient of drought intensity, simulated over 18 months, using mesocosms analogous to lowland headwater streams. We modelled the responses of 16 traits based on a priori predictions of trait filtering by drought, and also examined the responses of trait profile groups (TPGs) identified via hierarchical cluster analysis. As responses to drought intensification were both linear and nonlinear, generalized additive models (GAMs) were chosen to model response curves, with the slopes of fitted splines used to detect functional thresholds during drought. Drought triggered significant responses in 12 (75%) of the a priori-selected traits. Behavioural traits describing movement (dispersal, locomotion) and diet were sensitive to moderate-intensity drought, as channels fragmented into isolated pools. By comparison, morphological and physiological traits showed little response until surface water was lost, at which point we observed sudden shifts in body size, respiration mode and thermal tolerance. Responses varied widely among TPGs, ranging from population collapses of non-aerial dispersers as channels fragmented to irruptions of small, eurythermic dietary generalists upon extreme dewatering. Our study demonstrates for the first time that relatively small changes in drought intensity can trigger disproportionately large functional shifts in stream communities, suggesting that traits-based approaches could be particularly useful for diagnosing catastrophic ecological responses to global change.