Abstract
Ongoing climate change and rising water demands are resulting in the increasingly frequent occurrence of stream drying, particularly in smaller streams in humid temperate climates. These streams are often situated in outlying regions with insufficient wastewater treatment management leading to inconsistent inputs of nutrients into receiving water systems. Both stream drying and nutrient enrichment negatively affect local aquatic macroinvertebrate communities, but their combined effect is still unclear. This study aimed to investigate the combined effect of stream drying and nutrient enrichment on taxonomic and functional composition of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities. Towards this aim, an artificial stream system was used consisting of 36 mesocosms with aquatic macroinvertebrates. The mesocosms were exposed to four independent treatments based on different flow (perennial-drying) and nutrient (pristine-nutrient enriched) status. After 28 days of experiment, samples from different treatments were compared to evaluate combined effect of stream drying and nutrient enrichment. Despite expectations, no effect of drying on taxonomic and functional alpha diversity was observed, but beta diversity has significantly increased. Nutrient enrichment though caused to decrease in the alpha diversity indices, which resulted in high pre- and post-experiment samples dissimilarity within all treatments. Moreover, the combined effect of both stressors was antagonistic as stream drying moderated harsher impact of nutrient enrichment. Results emphasize an unexplored role of intermittent streams in nutrient cycling in temperate climates and highlight the need for further investigation of recently novel intermittent streams since they provide different environmental conditions for macroinvertebrates than perennial streams.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during the research and analysed in the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the H2020 European Research and Innovation action Grant Agreement no. 869226 (DRYvER) and the Czech Science Foundation (P505-20-17305S). BP and ZC were supported by the Higher Education Institutional Excellence Programme of the Ministry of Human Capacities in Hungary (20765-3/2018/FEKUTSTRAT, TUDFO/47138/2019-ITM and 2020-4.1.1-TKP2020). We thank Balázs József Berta (University of Pécs, Hungary) and Denis Bućan (University of Zagreb, Croatia) for great help during fieldwork and set of experimental background and especially Éva Horváthné Tihanyi and Tímea Pernyeszi (both University of Pécs, Hungary) for providing chemical analyses and technical support. Special thanks goes to Jacob VanHouten (Delta College, US Michigan) for English proofreading.
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Loskotová, B., Straka, M., Pernecker, B. et al. Combined effect of stream drying and nutrient enrichment on macroinvertebrate community: experimental study from artificial stream mesocosms. Aquat Sci 85, 23 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-022-00924-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-022-00924-w