Ms Bridget White1, Mr Sean Atkinson2, Associate Professor Belinda Robson2, Professor Russell Death3, Associate Professor Leon Barmuta1

1University Of Tasmania, Australia, 2Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, 3River Research, New Zealand

Biography:

Bridget is currently doing a PhD studying how freshwater macroinvertebrate communities respond to agricultural conversion, and how this affects their response to flow changes.

Abstract:

Freshwater macroinvertebrate communities are altered by the press disturbance of upstream conversion to agriculture as well as pulse disturbances by temporary changes to flow. The diversity and redundancy of response traits should be key to understanding how chronic disturbances affect the capacity of communities to respond to pulses of changed flow. We experimentally tested how the ecosystem changes resulting from agricultural conversion affected the short-term responses of macroinvertebrate communities to flow changes using temporary weirs in each of eight streams in Tasmania spanning a range of catchment conversion using a before-after control-impact study design. As well as documenting changes in community structure, we also measured decomposition (using both leaves and cotton strips) and accumulation of algal biomass during and after flow change as proxies of the major ecosystem functions in these streams to provide a comprehensive picture of the different aspects of ecosystem recovery.