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Community–environment relationships of riverine invertebrate communities in central Chinese streams

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Abstract

Chinese rivers are both highly biodiverse and highly under pressure, hence an urgent need exists to understand ecological drivers and disentangle different scales of stressors to support water management. Our aims were to (1) determine the most influential variables for benthic invertebrate occurrence, (2) compare results related to communities as opposed to metrics and (3) examine the role of spatial scales with relevance to management. Benthic invertebrate sampling was performed at 37 sites in selected tributaries of the middle reaches of the Yangtze, covering an environmental gradient with a focus on organic pollution (stratified sampling design). Ten metrics commonly used in biomonitoring were derived and analysed in parallel to assemblage data. Environmental variables covered 74 parameters from three different spatial scales, namely local, reach and catchment scale. We ran a CCA with each of the three subsets to find out the significant determining/explanatory variables, followed by pCCA and pRDA (for metric data) with these variables with forward selection to determine single variables important for each subset; we further used variation portioning for benthic invertebrate data. A high percentage of overall variability (70 %) of the assemblage structure was explained, with catchment- and local-scale variables being almost equally important. Small-scale variables tended to be more important than large-scale variables for the metric-based approach but not for the assemblage approach. Our results emphasise the need for spatially explicit regional studies in freshwater systems and suggest testing multi-metric assessment approaches to tackle water management and environmental health questions in China.

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Acknowledgments

The present study was conducted in the framework of the DFG-NSFC cooperation group “EcoChange” (GZ465). During initial fieldwork, SCJ was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and German Academic Exchange Service (BMBF and DAAD) within the programme “Study and research for sustainability: Yangtze region” with a research fellowship and by the Young scientist research award 2008 of the University of Duisburg-Essen. SCJ also acknowledges financial support by the research funding programme “LOEWE—Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung Wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz” of Hesse’s Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts and by the BMBF for funding “GLANCE” (Global change effects in river ecosystems; 01LN1320A).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecosystem Research, Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Müggelseedamm 301, 12587, Berlin, Germany

    Sonja C. Jähnig

  2. Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), Senckenberganlage 25, 60325, Frankfurt, Germany

    Deep Narayan Shah, Ram Devi Tachamo Shah, Fengqing Li & Jonathan D. Tonkin

  3. Department of River Ecology and Conservation, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, Clamecystr. 12, 63571, Gelnhausen, Germany

    Deep Narayan Shah, Ram Devi Tachamo Shah, Fengqing Li, Andrea Sundermann & Jonathan D. Tonkin

  4. State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430072, People’s Republic of China

    Qinghua Cai

  5. Department of Applied Zoology/Hydrobiology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitätsstr. 5, 45141, Essen, Germany

    Sonja Stendera

  6. Statkraft Markets GmbH, Derendorfer Allee 2a, 40476, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Sonja Stendera

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  1. Sonja C. Jähnig
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  2. Deep Narayan Shah
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  3. Ram Devi Tachamo Shah
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  4. Fengqing Li
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  5. Qinghua Cai
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  6. Andrea Sundermann
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  7. Jonathan D. Tonkin
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  8. Sonja Stendera
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Correspondence to Sonja C. Jähnig.

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Sonja Stendera’s views expressed here are personal and not those of the employer.

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Jähnig, S.C., Shah, D.N., Tachamo Shah, R.D. et al. Community–environment relationships of riverine invertebrate communities in central Chinese streams. Environ Earth Sci 74, 6431–6442 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-4466-8

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