Long‐term changes in community assembly, resistance, and resilience following experimental floods

This study examined the long‐term changes in community assembly, resistance, and resilience of macroinvertebrates following 10 years of experimental floods in a flow regulated river. Physico‐chemistry, macroinvertebrates, and periphyton biomass were monitored before and sequentially after each of 22 floods, and drift/seston was collected during six separate floods over the study period. The floods reduced the density and taxon richness of macroinvertebrates, and a nonmetric dimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis distinguished temporal shifts in community assembly. Resistance (measured as the relative lack of loss in density) to floods varied among taxa, and the abundance of resistant taxa was related to the temporal changes in community assembly. Community resistance was inversely related to flood magnitude with all larger floods (>25 m 3 /s, >16‐fold over baseflow) reducing densities by >75% regardless of flood year, whereas smaller floods (<20 m 3 /s) reduced taxon richness approximately twofold less than larger floods. No relationship was found between flood magnitude and the relative loss in periphyton biomass. Resilience was defined as the recovery slope (positive slope of a parameter with time following each flood) and was unrelated to shifts in community assembly or resistance. Macroinvertebrate drift and seston demonstrated hysteresis (i.e., a temporal response in parameter quantity with change in discharge) during each flood, although larger floods typically had two peaks in both parameters. The first peak was a response to the initial increases in flow, whereas the second peak was associated with streambed disturbance (substrate mobility) and side‐slope failure causing increased scour. Drift density was 3–9 times greater and that of seston 3–30 times greater during larger floods than smaller floods. These results demonstrate temporal shifts in macroinvertebrate community assembly toward a pre‐dam assemblage following sequential floods in this flow regulated river, thus confirming the ecological role of habitat filtering in organism distribution and abundance. Community resistance and resilience were unrelated to shifts in community assembly, suggesting that they are mostly evolutionary properties of ecosystems as populations adapt to changing environmental (disturbance regimes) and biotic (novel colonists) conditions. As these systems show behaviors similar to dispersal‐limited ecosystems, a long‐term perspective is required for management actions targeted toward regulated and fragmented rivers.