Vegetation and flow regime in lowland streams

Abstract

Summary1. The hydrological regime is important to the distribution of benthic organisms in streams. The objective of this study was to identify relationships between hydrological variables, describing the flow regime, and macrophyte cover, species richness, diversity and community composition in Danish lowland streams.2. We quantified macrophyte vegetation in 44 Danish streams during summer by cover, species richness and diversity. Flow regime was characterized by 18 non‐intercorrelated variables describing magnitude, frequency and duration of low and high flow events, timing or predictability of flow and general flow variability.3. We found support in the stepwise multiple regressions analysis for our expectation that macrophyte cover is lowest in streams with high flow variability and highest in streams with long duration of low flow and low flow variability. We found support for the intermediate disturbance hypothesis as there were significant quadratic relationships between species richness and diversity as functions of disturbance frequency. There was poor discrimination in a detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) analysis of macrophyte community composition between four twinspan groups separating streams with different hydrological properties. Moreover, we did not find any relationship between the presence of disturbance‐tolerant species and hydrological disturbance, suggesting that plant community composition developed independently of stream hydrology.