Elimination of sediments from river reservoirs is a common management problem for hydroelectric power plants. Periodical flushing can have negative impacts downstream. This study investigated the impact of a flushing event on the physico-chemical changes in the downstream sections and on the consequences for the benthic macroinvertebrate community. A special emphasis was placed on trace metal f...

The proliferation of disease-vector mosquitoes has been attributed to the effects of land-use change. We investigated the relationship between land use, macroinvertebrate communities, and water chemistry in water-filled containers in native forest, pasture land, and urban land at two locations (Waikanae and Paraparaumu) in the Kapiti region, New Zealand. Larvae of the endemic Culex pervigilans ...

Comprehensive research on the structural and functional variability of benthic macroinvertebrate communities within headwater streams is limited, despite the fact that the majority of streams within a watershed are headwater streams that form the primary link between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, we investigated the structure and function of benthic macroinvertebrate communitie...

BACKGROUND Removal of organic micropollutants from wastewater by post-ozonation has been investigated in a municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) temporarily upgraded with full-scale ozonation, followed by sand filtration, as an additional treatment step of the secondary effluent. Here, the SPEAR (species at risk) indicator was used to analyse macroinvertebrate abundance data that were col...

Often simple metrics are used to summarise complex patterns in stream benthic ecology, thus it is important to understand how well these metrics can explain the finer-scale underlying environmental variation often hidden by coarser-scale influences. I sampled 47 relatively pristine streams in the central North Island of New Zealand in 2007 and (1) evaluated the local-scale drivers of macroinver...

Catchment-scale land-use change is recognised as a major threat to aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem functioning globally. In the UK uplands rotational vegetation burning is practised widely to boost production of recreational game birds, and while some recent studies have suggested burning can alter river water quality there has been minimal attention paid to effects on aquatic biota. We stud...

We examine global patterns of benthic macroinvertebrate biomass and its distribution among functional feeding guilds in marine intertidal cOnmlunities. Variation in ash-free dry biomass was related to physical variables (mean annual air and water temperatures, sediment grain size, intertidal slope, tide range and type, wave height and exposure) by least-squares regression analysis of data for 3...

Recognition that intermittent pools are a single habitat phase of an intermittent pool bed that cycles between aquatic and terrestrial habitat greatly enhances their usefulness for addressing general questions in ecology. The aquatic phase has served as a model system in many ecological studies, because it has distinct habitat boundaries in space and time and is an excellent experimental system...

Spawning salmon create patches of disturbance through redd digging which can reduce macroinvertebrate abundance and biomass in spawning habitat. We asked whether displaced invertebrates use non-spawning habitats as refugia in streams. Our study explored how the spatial and temporal distribution of macroinvertebrates changed during a pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) spawning run and compared...

Back-propagation Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were tested with the aim of modelling the occurrence of benthic macroinvertebrate families in a south Brazilian river. The dataset, consisting of 67 sets of observations of macroinvertebrate abundance (families Hydrobiidae, Tubificidae, Chironomidae, Baetidae and Leptophlebiidae) and water quality variables (pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, bi...