Publication details
Mayflies and drought – how survive in the intermittent streams?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Global climate change brings to Central Europe remarkable alterations in hydrological regime – more frequent floods and also quite new phenomena – drying up of the small watercourses. In the Czech Republic, small streams and rivers (up to 4th Strahler order) constitute 80% of length of all watercourses. According to climate models, we expect that drought will be crucial problem in the future. The ongoing project "Drying up of streams during climate change" (acronym BIODROUGHT) is focused on the impact of drought on macroinvertebrate communities and the main goal of this project is to develop a method of retrospective biological indication of dry episodes based on the analysis of taxonomic and functional composition of macroinvertebrate assemblages. One of the most drought sensitive taxa are mayflies (Ephemeroptera). In this project, we compared mayfly taxocenoses in permanent and intermittent streams in the Czech Republic. The dataset used for the comparison include data from samples from 13 pairs of streams (permanent + intermittent) collected in years 2012 – 2014. All samples were taken in spring and autumn on relatively unimpacted streams without an obvious pollution and/or hydromorphological alterations. The results show that drought has apparent impact on mayfly taxocenoses in the total number of taxa and also the abundances were lower at the intermittent sites in comparison with the permanent ones. The representation of specific species-traits (for example voltinism) differed between both types of streams. Moreover, some drought sensitive taxa could be considered as permanency indicators (e.g. Epeorus assimilis). Using the combination of different metrics and approaches, it seems to be possible to distinguish between intermittent and permanent sites according to the composition of mayfly taxocoenes. This study was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (No. TA02020395 and Project No. MUNI/A/0888/2013). |