TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of land-cover transitions on emerging aquatic insects and environmental characteristics of headwater streams in an agricultural catchment
AU - Goss, Charles W.
AU - Sullivan, S. Mažeika P.
AU - Goebel, P. Charles
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by The Ohio State University Climate, Water, and Carbon Targeted Investment in Excellence (CWC-TIE) Program, the National Science Foundation STEM Graduate Fellows in K-12 (NSF GK-12) Education Program, Grant No. 0638669, and an Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) SEEDS grant. Thanks to N. Rosenbaum and E. Gorrell for assistance sampling and processing aquatic insects and to L. Rieck and other members of the Stream and River Ecology (STRIVE) Lab for field guidance. We would also like to thank private landowners for their willingness to participate in this study, as well as anonymous reviewers that contributed to improvements to earlier manuscript drafts.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by The Ohio State University Climate, Water, and Carbon Targeted Investment in Excellence (CWC‐TIE) Program, the National Science Foundation STEM Graduate Fellows in K‐12 (NSF GK‐12) Education Program, Grant No. 0638669, and an Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) SEEDS grant. Thanks to N. Rosenbaum and E. Gorrell for assistance sampling and processing aquatic insects and to L. Rieck and other members of the Stream and River Ecology (STRIVE) Lab for field guidance. We would also like to thank private landowners for their willingness to participate in this study, as well as anonymous reviewers that contributed to improvements to earlier manuscript drafts.
Funding Information:
National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: STEM Graduate Fellows in K‐12 (NSF GK‐12) Educatio; Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Ohio State University, Grant/Award Number: SEEDS; The Ohio State University, Grant/Award Number: Climate, Water, and Carbon Program, an initiative of Ohio State's Targeted Investment of Excellence Funding information
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - Streams and their adjacent riparian zones are increasingly viewed as interdependent systems linked by reciprocal exchanges of energy, organisms, and materials. We assessed potential associations between the emerging aquatic insect flux and transitions between agricultural land and forest fragments to better understand these stream-riparian linkages in managed landscapes. We sampled stream environmental conditions and emerging insects at 28 sites distributed along three streams flowing through agriculture-forest-agriculture transitions in central Ohio, USA, in the summer of 2012. Ephemeroptera and Trichoptera (ET) taxa had higher flux densities in forests (mean and 95% CI: 0.3 insects m−2 d−1 [0.1, 0.8]) compared to agriculture (mean and 95% CI: 0 insect m−2 d−1 [0, 0.1]; p =.004), and ET taxa were found in 67% of forested sites compared to only 15% of agricultural sites. In contrast, Dolichopodidae were more strongly associated with agricultural land (mean and 95% CI: 0.6 insect m−2 d−1 [0.3 to 1.2]) than forests (mean and 95% CI: 0.1 insects m−2 d−1 [0.1, 0.2]; p =.002). Although Chironomidae were the most numerically abundant, ET taxa were among the larger bodied insects and comprised >30% of the total biomass flux, illustrating the importance of taxonomic traits in mediating flux dynamics. Mechanisms driving emerging insect flux were related to substrate grain-size distribution, channel width, and nutrient concentrations. Overall, our results demonstrate that small forest fragments are strongly related to the aquatic-to-terrestrial insect flux and thus have important implications for terrestrial biodiversity and food webs in agricultural landscapes.
AB - Streams and their adjacent riparian zones are increasingly viewed as interdependent systems linked by reciprocal exchanges of energy, organisms, and materials. We assessed potential associations between the emerging aquatic insect flux and transitions between agricultural land and forest fragments to better understand these stream-riparian linkages in managed landscapes. We sampled stream environmental conditions and emerging insects at 28 sites distributed along three streams flowing through agriculture-forest-agriculture transitions in central Ohio, USA, in the summer of 2012. Ephemeroptera and Trichoptera (ET) taxa had higher flux densities in forests (mean and 95% CI: 0.3 insects m−2 d−1 [0.1, 0.8]) compared to agriculture (mean and 95% CI: 0 insect m−2 d−1 [0, 0.1]; p =.004), and ET taxa were found in 67% of forested sites compared to only 15% of agricultural sites. In contrast, Dolichopodidae were more strongly associated with agricultural land (mean and 95% CI: 0.6 insect m−2 d−1 [0.3 to 1.2]) than forests (mean and 95% CI: 0.1 insects m−2 d−1 [0.1, 0.2]; p =.002). Although Chironomidae were the most numerically abundant, ET taxa were among the larger bodied insects and comprised >30% of the total biomass flux, illustrating the importance of taxonomic traits in mediating flux dynamics. Mechanisms driving emerging insect flux were related to substrate grain-size distribution, channel width, and nutrient concentrations. Overall, our results demonstrate that small forest fragments are strongly related to the aquatic-to-terrestrial insect flux and thus have important implications for terrestrial biodiversity and food webs in agricultural landscapes.
KW - agricultural streams
KW - biodiversity
KW - emerging aquatic insects
KW - food webs
KW - forest fragments
KW - nutrients
KW - subsidies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086270708&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/rra.3639
DO - 10.1002/rra.3639
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85086270708
SN - 1535-1459
VL - 36
SP - 1097
EP - 1108
JO - River Research and Applications
JF - River Research and Applications
IS - 7
ER -