Author(s): Vermeiren Peter; Reichert Peter; Schuwirth Nele
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Abstract: Multiple human and natural influence factors affect invertebrate communities in rivers, with knock on effects on ecosystem functioning and goods and services provisioning. Despite well-developed knowledge on invertebrateenvironment interactions and the availability of large biomonitoring datasets, critical issues remain in disentangling effects of multiple stressors and moving towards understanding that is applicable across river basins with different taxonomic compositions. We aimed to test and improve current understanding of how community composition of macro-invertebrates in rivers is influenced by environmental factors that change across natural and anthropogenic gradients. Therefore, we formalized expert knowledge on invertebrateenvironment interactions, available in trait databases, to predict the probability of occurrence of taxa within characteristic communities at sites throughout Switzerland. We derived direct environmental factors that describe local habitat conditions from indirect environmental factors including land use, pollution sources, river morphology and topography. Local environmental conditions were then combined with data on trait preferences for each taxon to derive a habitat suitability for each environmental factor and taxon at each site. Additional factors such as the spatial context of the site and the regional species pool were taken into account. The model was calibrated with monitoring data using a generalized linear model and Bayesian inference was used to validate and improve knowledge on trait preferences of individual taxa. The model allows a test of cause-effect relationships for different human stressors and allows synthesis, testing and improvement of current trait knowledge.
Year: 2018