CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Urbanization and industrialization produce substantial changes in biodiversity and inthe functionality of ecosystems. However, little is known about how anthropic pressuresmight drive these changes and about their functional consequences. We aimed todetermine the responses of macroinvertebrate biological traits to urban and industrialpollution and assess the impacts of these disturbances on the functional diversity ofthese assemblages. We sampled benthic macroinvertebrates in 27 sites of four basinswith different urban disturbance gradients (rural, peri-urban, and urban-industrial),among them the Matanza-Riachuelo River, one of the most polluted basins in theworld. We classified macroinvertebrates into 11 traits and 56 categories. Then, weperformed an RLQ analysis and computed functional richness, evenness, anddivergence and Rao diversity indexes for each site and community weighted means foreach trait category. The urban and industrial sites (mainly low and middle MatanzaRiachuelo River Basin) showed high concentrations of ammonium, SRP, conductivity,COD, BOD, and organic matter, as well as the lowest values of DO. The functionaldiversity of these sites was significantly lower than that of the other sites.Macroinvertebrate traits associated with urban and industrial sites were aerialrespiration (spiracles), forms of resistance (eggs or statoblast), cylindrical body shape,oviparity, feeding on microinvertebrates, and full water swimmers. These traitspotentially enabled tolerant species persistence at polluted sites while gills, grazers,and crawlers were sensitive to these disturbances. Urban and industrial activitiesinfluence biological traits, producing the disappearance or dominance of certain traitsin macroinvertebrate assemblages. Therefore, these disturbances have causedpredictable community functional changes, affecting the functional diversity, and may,therefore, change the ecosystem function.

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