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Dry phase duration and periodicity alter clitellate communities in central European intermittent streams

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Abstract

Small streams in the temperate continental region of central Europe have been recently exposed to frequent drying. We investigated the effects of drying on clitellate communities in 25 small streams evenly distributed along the gradient of flow intermittence. We observed that the community exposed to both irregular and periodic drying could maintain local species diversity. However, significant differences in clitellate species composition were observed between perennial, irregularly drying, and intermittent streams. The effect of drying was even stronger in intermittent streams, where significantly lower beta diversity was observed compared to perennial streams. The most important changes in clitellate composition were controlled by water temperature and geographical variables in perennial streams, while streams affected by drying were controlled by climate, with high mean July air temperature and low annual precipitation sums amplifying the effect. The abundance of semiaquatic species was also affected by the periodicity of the dry phase, with their proportion predicted in the regression tree analysis to be 11% in perennial and irregularly drying streams, and 40% in periodically drying streams. The observed changes in clitellate community structure suggest a gradual adaptation to increasing drying severity, in which sensitive species (e.g., rheobionts) may be replaced by desiccation-tolerant and semiaquatic species.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ondřej Hájek for map preparation and Veronika Horsáková for language revision. Comments from two reviewers have considerably improved the quality of the manuscript. The study was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (P505/20-17305S).

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The study was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (P505/20-17305S).

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  1. Department of Botany and Zoology, Masaryk University, Kotlářská 2, 61137, Brno, Czechia

    Jana Schenková, Michal Horsák, Marek Polášek & Petr Pařil

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  1. Jana Schenková
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Conceptualization, Funding acquisition; Review & Editing: MH; Writing original draft, Formal analysis, Visualization: JS, Data curation; Review & Editing: MP; Funding acquisition; Data curation; Validation; Methodology; Review & Editing: PP.

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Correspondence to Jana Schenková.

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Schenková, J., Horsák, M., Polášek, M. et al. Dry phase duration and periodicity alter clitellate communities in central European intermittent streams. Hydrobiologia 849, 3245–3258 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-022-04933-6

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