Direct habitat descriptors improve the understanding of the organization of fish and macroinvertebrate communities across a large catchment.

ABSTRACT: In large-scale aquatic ecological studies, direct habitat descriptors (e.g. water temperature, hydraulics in river reaches) are often approximated by coarse-grain surrogates (e.g. air temperature, discharge respectively) since they are easier to measure or model. However, as biological variability can be very strong at the habitat scale, surrogate variables may have a limited ability to capture all of this variability, which may lead to a lesser understanding of the ecological processes or patterns of interest. In this study, we aimed to compare the capacity of direct habitat descriptors vs. surrogate environmental variables to explain the organization of fish and macroinvertebrate communities across the Loire catchment in France (105 km2). For this purpose, we relied on high-resolution en

SUBMITTER: Picard C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9498974 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature