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Are macroinvertebrate functional traits useful in differentiating hydrologically variable small piedmont streams and their recovery from drought?
Citation:
Kosnicki, E., B. Schneid, K. M. FRITZ, AND J. Feminella. Are macroinvertebrate functional traits useful in differentiating hydrologically variable small piedmont streams and their recovery from drought? Presented at Society for Freshwater Science, Louisville, KY, May 20 - 24, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
The goal of this research is to develop methods and indicators that are useful for evaluating the condition of aquatic communities, for assessing the restoration of aquatic communities in response to mitigation and best management practices, and for determining the exposure of aquatic communities to different classes of stressors (i.e., pesticides, sedimentation, habitat alteration).
Description:
We quantified benthic macroinvertebrates in six small (1st order) Alabama piedmont streams from 1994-1998. Streams spanned a gradient of hydrologic permanence from typically intermittent to perennial, the degree of permanence for a given stream depending on water year. Initial sampling (1994) followed a severe drought year (1993). Information for 59 benthic trait modalities (USGS macroinvertebrate trait database) were extracted and fuzzy coded. Correlation analyses were used to identify independent modalities useful for assessing recovery from drought or differentiating between permanent and intermittent streams. Correspondence analyses were used to explore assemblage and trait structures related to the most and least permanent streams. Collector-filterers showed a preference for more perennial streams, whereas intermittent streams had a higher proportion of shredders. Perennial stream assemblages also were composed of many taxa with an affinity towards higher-order streams. Within-site taxa turnover estimates during summer indicated that intermittent stream assemblages were more temporally variable (less stable) than perennial assemblages during recovery. These data suggest that macroinvertebrate trait approaches are complimentary to traditional assemblage-based analyses in discriminating differences among small streams of contrasting hydrologic permanence.