Response of three lotic assemblages to riparian and catchment-scale land use: Implications for designing catchment monitoring programmes

Abstract

1.Although many studies have focussed on the effects of catchment land use on lotic systems, the importance of broad (catchment) and fine (segment/reach) scale effects on stream assemblages remain poorly understood. 2.Nine biological metrics for macrophytes (498 sites), benthic macroinvertebrates (491) and fish (478) of lowland and mountain streams in four ecoregions of France and Germany were related to catchment and riparian buffer land use using partial Redundancy Analysis and Boosted Regression Trees (BRTs). 3.Lotic fauna was better correlated (mean max., r=0.450) than flora (r=0.277) to both scales of land use: the strongest correlations were noted for mountain streams. BRTs revealed strong non-linear relationships between mountain assemblage metrics and land use. Correlations increased with increasing buffer lengths, suggesting the importance of near-stream land use on biotic assemblages. 4.Several metrics changed markedly between 10-20% (mountain ecoregions) and 40-45% (lowland) of arable land use, irrespective of the buffer size. At mountain sites with >10% catchment arable land use, metric values differed between sites with <30% and sites with >30% forest in the near-stream riparian area. 5.These findings support the role of riparian land use in catchment management; however, differences between mountain and lowland ecoregions support the need for ecoregion-specific management. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.