Abstract
Rapid urbanisation has led to major landscape alterations, affecting aquatic ecosystems’ hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, and biodiversity. Thus, habitat alteration is considered a major driver of aquatic biodiversity loss and related aquatic ecosystem goods and services. This study aimed to investigate and compare aquatic macroinvertebrate richness, diversity and community structure between urban temporary wetlands, located within protected and un-protected areas. The latter were found within an open public space or park with no protection or conservation status, whereas the former were inaccessible to the public and had formal protected, conservation status. We hypothesised that; (1) protected urban wetlands will harbour higher aquatic macroinvertebrate biodiversity (both dry and wet) as compared to un-protected urban wetlands, and (2) that the community composition between the two urban wetlands types will be significantly different. Contrary to our hypothesis, our results revealed no major differences between protected and un-protected urban wetlands, based on the measures investigated (i.e. taxon richness, Shannon-Weiner diversity, Pielou's evenness and community composition) during the dry and wet phase. The only exception was community composition, which revealed significant differences between these urban wetland types. These results suggest that human activities (potential littering and polluting) in the un-protected urban wetlands have not yet resulted in drastic change in macroinvertebrate richness and composition, at least from the dry phase. This suggests a potential for un-protected urban wetlands suffering from minimal human impact to act as important reservoirs of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Highlights
Temporary wetlands are small, shallow, isolated depressions that become inundated after sustained rainfall events and can hold water for a few days, weeks or months before completely drying up again [1,2,3]
The present study aimed to investigate and compare aquatic macroinvertebrate taxa richness, diversity and community structure through hatching soil sediments collected during the dry phase and those sampled during the aquatic wet phase, in five protected urban wetlands, against five un-protected urban wetlands (Ottery public park space)
During the hatching assays, 18 aquatic macroinvertebrates taxa were found in the protected urban wetland sites and only 15 in the unprotected urban wetland sites
Summary
Temporary (ephemeral) wetlands are small, shallow, isolated depressions that become inundated after sustained rainfall events and can hold water for a few days, weeks or months before completely drying up again [1,2,3]. Organisms adapted to living in temporary wetlands have the capacity to deal with the alternating wet and dry phases, resulting in unique and specialised aquatic and semi-aquatic communities not found elsewhere [2, 6] This allows temporary wetlands to contribute a disproportionately high percentage to regional biodiversity estimates [7]. Temporary wetlands house one of the highest proportion of endangered organisms than any other freshwater ecosystems [8,9,10]
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