Abstract
Rivers of tropical islands formed by volcanic eruptions experience unpredictable and heavy rainfall and are characterised by irregular topography. During the 2019 and 2020 low-water season, we investigated the responses of benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages to variations in local environmental conditions in four rivers located in areas of different rainfall intensity. We found that changes in local environmental conditions associated with lower rainfall intensity reduced abundance and taxonomic richness and modified taxonomic composition but did not impact the balance of functional feeding groups of macroinvertebrate communities amongst streams, except for piercer herbivores. Heterotrophy associated with substrate instability and autotrophy with a more stable substrate co-occurred in semi-arid climate rivers. In contrast, a change from heterotrophy upstream to autotrophy and substrate stability downstream was apparent in the two humid rivers studied. Surrogates of stream ecosystem function revealed a very low ratio of coarse to fine particulate organic matter related to the quasi-absence of shredders in these streams and suggested a low allochthonous input contribution, which could be the result of the 5% decline in forest cover over the two past decades.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the authors upon request.
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Funding
Chevelie Cineas received funds from the French Embassy in Haiti in the context of a co-tutelle PhD thesis between the University of Lyon 1 (France) and the State University of Haiti (Haiti). This work was also performed under the auspice of the EUR H2O’Lyon (ANR-17-EURE-0018) of Université de Lyon (UdL) within the programme ‘Investissements d’Avenir’ operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR). This article was previously edited for proper English language, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and overall style by two highly qualified native English-speaking editors at American Journal Experts (certification verification key 46E4-0CD9-C540-699E-534P issued on October 28, 2023, and certification key 200-249-228-302-385 issued on March 11, 2024).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Chevelie Cinéas and Sylvain Dolédec. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Chevelie Cinéas and Sylvain Dolédec commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Cinéas, C., Dolédec, S. Influence of climate, physical and chemical variables on the taxonomic and functional responses of macroinvertebrate communities in tropical island rivers. Hydrobiologia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-024-05532-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-024-05532-3