Habitat suitability curves for benthic macroinvertebrates from a small New Zealand river

Abstract

We developed habitat suitability curves (HSC) using generalised additive models (GAMs) for nine benthic macroinvertebrate taxa from a small New Zealand river for hydraulic-habitat modelling assessments of instream flow requirements. We included interaction terms between the primary variables (water depth, velocity, substrate) when significant, to address a longstanding criticism of univariate HSC. To date, only large-river univariate HSC have been available and these have been used in hydraulic-habitat applications on small rivers, despite doubt over the transferability of HSC between rivers of different size and type. We tested the outcome on the predicted abundance–flow relationship of applying the small-river habitat suitability GAMs versus large-river GAMs for two taxa on the same small river. We found the effects of flow allocation were overestimated by the large-river GAMs relative to the small-river GAMs. Further research to develop general HSC for categories of river size and type is needed to better inform hydraulic-habitat modelling applications.