A global assessment of environmental and climate influences on wetland macroinvertebrate community structure and function

EPELE, LUIS B.; WILLIAMS-SUBIZA, EMILIO A.; MATALONI, G.

Global Change Biology

John Wiley and Sons Inc

Año: 2024 vol. 30

Estimating organisms´ responses to environmental variables and taxon associationsacross broad spatial scales is vital for predicting their responses to climate change.Macroinvertebrates play a major role in wetland processes, but studies simultaneouslyexploring both community structure and community trait responses to environmentalgradients are still lacking. We compiled a global dataset (six continents)from 756 depressional wetlands, including the occurrence of 96 macroinvertebratefamilies, their phylogenetic tree, and 19 biological traits. Using Bayesian hierarchicaljoint species distribution models (JSDMs), we estimated macroinvertebrate associationsand compared the influences of local and climatic predictors on both individualmacroinvertebrate families and their traits. While macroinvertebrate families weremainly related to broad-scalefactors (maximum temperature and precipitation seasonality),macroinvertebrate traits were strongly related to local wetland hydroperiod.Interestingly, macroinvertebrate families and traits both showed positive andnegative associations to the same environmental variables. As expected, many macroinvertebratefamily occurrences were positively associated with temperature, buta few showed the opposite pattern and were found in cooler or montane regions.We also found that wetland macroinvertebrate communities would likely be affectedby changing climates through alterations in traits related to precipitation seasonality,temperature seasonality, and wetland area. Temperature increases may negativelyaffect collector and shredder functional groups. A decrease in precipitation couldlead to reductions in wetland area benefiting drought-tolerantmacroinvertebrates,but it may negatively affect macroinvertebrates lacking those adaptations. Wetland processes may be compromised through broad-scaleenvironmental changes alteringmacroinvertebrate family distributions and local hydroperiod shifts altering organismtraits. Our complementary family-basedand trait-basedapproaches elucidate thecomplex effects that climate change may produce on wetland ecosystems.