Resistance of Australian fish communities to drought and flood: implications for climate change and adaptations

Abstract

Climate change‐induced extreme weather and related drought and flood conditions are heterogeneous across space and time. The variability in location, timing, and magnitude of rainfall can alter how species respond to the drought and flood disturbances. To further complicate this matter, when droughts end they are often followed by extreme flooding, which are rarely considered as a disturbance (Humphries et al. 2024), let alone assessed with its own heterogeneity. Consequently, it is difficult to quantify impacts on ecological communities across large spatiotemporal scales without considering flood‐drought disturbance characteristics in sequence (Burton et al. 2020). We hypothesized that native organisms have evolved resistance to withstand repeated cycles of drought‐flood disturbances, and that established non‐native species have adapted to persist in novel conditions. To test this, we fit spatiotemporal models of species occurrence with local rainfall patterns as covariates in the drought and flood impacted Murray‐Darling basin in Australia during the decade long Millenium Drought, and its recovery period. During these drought conditions, river‐floodplain organisms in the Murray‐Darling became localized in refugia that limited longitudinal and lateral connectivity (Bond et al. 2008), and following flooding the same organisms were exposed to dispersal and recruitment opportunities (Humphries et al. 2020), as well as to hypoxic blackwater events that lead to the mortality of aquatic organisms (Small et al. 2014). At the basin‐scale we found that the range size of most native and non‐native fishes were highly resistant to the extreme drought and post‐flood conditions. At local scales, species richness, or detection, actually increased under drought conditions. Both findings highlight the resistance of species to climate change driven extreme weather, which opens new questions on community adaptations.