Disproportional vulnerability of mountain aquatic invertebrates to climate change effects

ABSTRACT

Mountain freshwater communities are generally considered sensible to accelerated climatic changes, though their vulnerabilities have not been well evaluated. Individual species or species groups are expected to respond differently depending on their adaptations, traits, or distributions, but this has not yet been distinguished. This work used available climate change vulnerability scores (ccvs) of European Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera (EPT) species (n = 1,402) to (1) compare the vulnerability between species pools of different ecoregions including alpine species and alpine endemics, (2) contrast the vulnerability between the different insect orders, and (3) assess the altitude–vulnerability relationship within the European Alps. We revealed fifty alpine Plecoptera and Trichoptera species that are categorized highly vulnerable to climate change effects (= 31 percent of all highly vulnerable European species) with the highest proportions in species inventories of alpine endemics and high-altitude waters (51 percent of high-altitude species are classified as highly vulnerable). The ccvs analysis specifically for mountain waters shows that a disproportionately high number of alpine species, and particularly alpine endemics, will be affected by climate change and suggests that Ephemeroptera may be better prepared than Plecoptera and Trichoptera. Thus, this trait-based evaluation suggests that mountain stream invertebrate communities are undergoing disproportionate restructurings in response to climate change effects more than lowland communities are.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• high altitude
• sensitivity
• Plecoptera
• Ephemeroptera
• Trichoptera

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge freshwaterecology.info for managing the collection of autecological information from freshwater invertebrates all over Europe. We are grateful for the constructive criticism and comments of four anonymous reviewers on an earlier version of the article. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability

The data used for this study are available via the KNB depository (Niedrist 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project number P 34310.