Climate change is predicted to increase the aridity of catchments, potentially increasing intermittency and decreasing connectivity of river networks. To predict how aquatic species will respond to habitat loss and fragmentation, the understanding of species traits and of the structural and functional connectivity of riverine metacommunities is required. In this study, macroinvertebrate sampling efforts archived by the California Environmental Data Exchange Network were analyzed to explore the effects of network position and landscape position on biodiversity. Species were divided into groups based on dispersal ability and Euclidean and stream-wise distances were used as a proxy for dispersal mode. Spatial statistical models for macroinvertebrates were fit using environmental variables (catchment characteristics and a in-stream variables) and distance measures.
Results/Conclusions
We found that sites had significant drops in species richness for all dispersal groups with increasing catchment urbanization, and that isolation of sites in the network had dispersal group-dependent results. We propose using landscape resistance measures and functional traits for future studies of biodiversity in riverine metacommunities.