Freshwater macroinvertebrate diversity and ecology

Freshwater macroinvertebrates — the insects, worms, crustaceans, and mollusks visible to the naked eye that live in streams and rivers — serve as both key drivers of ecosystem processes and sensitive indicators of water quality, making them central to understanding how human activity reshapes aquatic environments. Researchers in this area examine how land use changes such as agriculture, urbanization, and deforestation alter the composition, abundance, and function of these communities, often by modifying water chemistry, flow regimes, and habitat structure simultaneously. A major open question is how to disentangle the effects of multiple co-occurring stressors — nutrient enrichment, fine sediment, temperature rise, and drought — when each interacts with the others in ways that simple additive models fail to capture. At the same time, ecologists are working to understand how spatial connectivity among stream communities, framed through metacommunity theory, shapes the recovery of biodiversity after disturbance and what that means for the design of effective river restoration programs.

Works

178,361

Total citations

686,539

Keywords

Stream EcosystemsLand UseFreshwater BiodiversityAquatic InsectsEcosystem FunctioningRiver Restoration