Biodiversity dynamics in stream communities

Abstract

Stream and river ecosystems are especially vulnerable to various types of natural and anthropogenic disturbances, which threaten their capacity to provide important ecosystem services, like food and clean water. Water quality affects aquatic insects (or, slightly more generally, benthic macroinvertebrates) particularly strongly: these play a functional role in aquatic food webs (Song et al. 2007), and have therefore been widely used as indicators of ecosystem health (Hellawell 1986; Rosenberg and Resh 1993). Understanding how their ...