Freshwater macroinvertebrate diversity and ecology

Macroinvertebrates — the insects, worms, crustaceans, and mollusks visible to the naked eye that live in and around freshwater streams — serve as sensitive indicators of water quality and play central roles in breaking down organic matter, cycling nutrients, and sustaining food webs. Ecologists study how communities of these organisms respond to pressures such as agricultural runoff, urbanization, drought, and climate change, using that information both to diagnose ecosystem health and to guide river restoration efforts. A key challenge is disentangling the effects of multiple simultaneous stressors — altered hydrology, nutrient enrichment, and habitat loss often co-occur — making it difficult to identify which pressures drive community change and what recovery actually looks like. Researchers are also working to understand how species move and persist across networks of streams, a metacommunity perspective that reframes local diversity as something shaped as much by regional dispersal and connectivity as by local environmental conditions.

Works

176,673

Total citations

683,188

Keywords

Stream EcosystemsLand UseFreshwater BiodiversityAquatic InsectsEcosystem FunctioningRiver Restoration