Metrics of stability and resilience can quantify community structure and ability to resist or recover from disturbances. So far, stability and resilience research has had a strong focus on local systems. However, environmental change often occurs at broad, regional spatial scales, which requires landscape-level assessments of stability and resilience. Benthic fauna are considered good bio-indicators for environmental changes in aquatic ecosystems and thus suitable indicators of stability. We evaluated the environmental pressures affecting benthic invertebrate communities in northern and southern Swedish lakes. After accounting for the effects of the measured environmental parameters, we evaluated stability along a latitudinal gradient using time-series of littoral macroinvertebrate abundances from 1995 to 2016 in 108 lakes. We propose a way to estimate stability in invertebrate communities, dependent and independent of measured environmental variables. Using this approach, we tested the hypotheses that 1) the environmental variables determining invertebrate community assemblages in northern and southern Sweden are different i.e. communities in southern Sweden are more driven by variables linked to higher human population densities like acidification and eutrophication. We also expected that 2) there are systematic differences in invertebrate community stability along a latitudinal gradient as a result of increased pressures in the south.
Results/Conclusions
Our analyses revealed that the invertebrate community dynamics in the southern lakes are driven by broad environmental pressures affecting the region, namely acidification and eutrophication. Furthermore, we show higher latitude lakes to be less stable in their invertebrate community dynamics across time. Additionally, we highlight a subset of the lakes that are highly stable and conversely some that are highly variable and start to explore why we might be seeing these systematic differences in stability across a latitudinal gradient in a Nordic "lakescape".