Species extinctions have the potential to dramatically reshape ecological communities. In the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, the emergence of a lethal amphibian pathogen (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) drives mountain yellowlegged frog (Rana muscosa and Rana sierrae) populations to local extinction. Prior to population declines, these frogs and their tadpoles were abundant, highlevel p...

We analyzed data from riffle and snag habitats for 39 small cold water streams with different levels of watershed urbanization in Wisconsin and Minnesota to evaluate the influences of urban land use and instream habitat on macroinvertebrate communities. Multivariate analysis indicated that stream temperature and amount of urban land use in the watersheds were the most influential factors determ...

Suboptimal environmental conditions are ubiquitous in nature and commonly drive the outcome of biological interactions in community processes. Despite the importance of biological interactions for community processes, knowledge on how species interactions are affected by a limiting resource, for example, low food availability, remains limited. Here, we tested whether variation in food supply ca...

Background: Mongolia’s riverine landscape is divided into three watersheds, differing in extent of permafrost, amount of precipitation and in hydrological connectivity between sub-drainages. In order to assess the vulnerability of macroinvertebrate communities to ongoing climate change, we consider the taxonomic and functional structures of stream communities in two major watersheds: The Centra...

INTRODUCTION Fresh water is an important driving force, cycling minerals and nutrients around the terrestrial environment and has been defined as those systems comprising human communities, socioeconomic interactions, and biophysical processes co-occurring in space and time. Evaluation of the biological community of a water body provides a sensitive and cost effective means of assessing stream ...

We developed independent predictive disturbance models for a full regional data set and four individual ecoregions (Full Region vs. Individual Ecoregion models) to evaluate effects of spatial scale on the assessment of human landscape modification, on predicted response of stream biota, and the effect of other possible confounding factors, such as watershed size and elevation, on model performa...

Identifying land-use drivers of changes in river condition is complicated by spatial scale, geomorphological context, land management, and correlations among responding variables such as nutrients and sediments. Furthermore, variations in standard metrics, such as substratum composition, do not necessarily relate causally to ecological impacts. Consequently, the absence of a significant relatio...

We evaluated the restoration of physical habitats and its influence on macroinvertebrate community structure in 18 Danish lowland streams comprising six restored streams, six streams with little physical alteration and six channelized streams. We hypothesized that physical habitats and macroinvertebrate communities of restored streams would resemble those of natural streams, while those of the ...

Calcareous floating periphyton mats in the southern Everglades provide habitat for a diverse macroinvertebrate community that has not been well characterized. Our study described this community in an oligotrophic marsh, compared it with the macroinvertebrate community associated with adjacent epiphytic algae attached to macrophytes in the water column, and detected spatial patterns in density a...

The urbanization of agricultural lands is currently one of the dominant patterns of land use change in developed countries. In the United States and parts of Europe, this has led to the implementation of agricultural land preservation programs and riparian protection and replanting efforts along urban streams. The ecological benefits of such programs for the conservation of freshwater biodivers...