Abstract
Analyzing functional species’ characteristics (species traits) that represent physiological, life history and morphological characteristics of species help understanding the impacts of various stressors on aquatic communities at field conditions. This research aimed to study the combined effects of pesticides and other environmental factors (temperature, dissolved oxygen, dissolved organic carbon, floating macrophytes cover, phosphate, nitrite, and nitrate) on the trait modality distribution of aquatic macrofauna communities. To this purpose, a field inventory was performed in a flower bulb growing area of the Netherlands with significant variation in pesticides pressures. Macrofauna community composition, water chemistry parameters and pesticide concentrations in ditches next to flower bulb fields were determined. Trait modalities of nine traits (feeding mode, respiration mode, locomotion type, resistance form, reproduction mode, life stage, voltinism, saprobity, maximum body size) likely to indicate pesticides impacts were analyzed. According to a redundancy analysis, phosphate -and not pesticides- constituted the main factor structuring the trait modality distribution of aquatic macrofauna. The functional composition could be ascribed for 2–4 % to pesticides, and for 3–11 % to phosphate. The lack of trait responses to pesticides may indicate that species may have used alternative strategies to adapt to ambient pesticides stress. Biomass of animals exhibiting trait modalities related to feeding by predation and grazing, presence of diapause form or dormancy, reproduction by free clutches and ovoviviparity, life stage of larvae and pupa, was negatively correlated to the concentration of phosphate. Hence, despite the high pesticide pollution in the area, variation in nutrient-related stressors seems to be the dominant driver of the functional composition of aquatic macrofauna assembly in agricultural ditches.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10646-016-1671-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The responses of biotic communities to human-induced disturbances have been evaluated based on taxonomic approaches, e.g. by estimating the species composition or the performance of selected indicator species (Mouillot et al 2006)
The results of the Monte Carlo permutation test indicated that the first ordination axis was significant for the traits resistance form, feeding mode, reproduction type, and aquatic life stage, meaning that there was a significant relationship between the trait modality distributions of these traits, pesticides and environmental factors (Table 2)
The trait modalities of the other traits were not significantly correlated to explanatory variables included in the redundancy analysis (RDA)
Summary
The responses of biotic communities to human-induced disturbances have been evaluated based on taxonomic approaches, e.g. by estimating the species composition or the performance of selected indicator species (Mouillot et al 2006). Information obtained using traits-based approaches may be extrapolated to a broader range of species and geographical zones (Baird et al 2008; Doledec et al 2006; Charvet et al 2000). These approaches have been successfully developed for a wide array of plant (for instance, Engelhardt 2006; Quetier et al 2007; Suding et al 2008; Van Bodegom et al 2014) and animal communities, including invertebrates
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