Disentangling environmental drivers of macroinvertebrate community structure: the role of stream drying and wastewater pollution
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Due to the ongoing climate change which brings long term deficits of precipitations together with rising evapotranspiration related to higher temperatures, there is an increasing proportion of intermittent streams in continental temperate zone. Drying streams are exposed to diverse anthropogenic impacts including the input of urban pollution. The outflows of wastewater from sewage treatment plants is one of the most common forms of organic pollution in stream ecosystems and have adverse effect on benthic invertebrates. The response of stream biota to increase saprobity is well described in perennial systems. However, the evidence of structural and functional changes in benthic invertebrate assemblages in polluted intermittent streams is scarce. Using the “real world experiment” with sampling sites up- and downstream of sources of wastewater pollution in intermittent/perennial streams we studied how both factors affect benthic invertebrate community. We analysed water chemistry, duration of dry period and benthic invertebrate communities within the dataset of 16 sites from the Czech Republic. Benthic invertebrate community clearly differ between four studied groups (perennial non-polluted, perennial polluted, intermittent non-polluted, intermittent polluted) and was organized along two gradients. These gradients represent both studied factors (pollution, intermittence) and our results suggest that both factors have distinct but not the same effect on benthic invertebrates. Project was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (P505-20-17305S) and H2020 project DRYvER (869226). |
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