Recently, community ecology has emphasized the multi-facetted aspects of biological diversity by linking species traits and the environment. Here, we explored environmental correlates of taxonomically-based and traits-based compositional distances using a comprehensive data set of diatom and macroinvertebrate communities. We also explored the responses of different beta diversity components (i.e., overall beta diversity, turnover, and nestedness) of beta diversity facets (i.e., taxonomically and traits-based beta diversity) to environmental distances. Partial Mantel tests were used to test the relationships between beta diversity and environmental distance (while controlling for spatial distances). Taxonomically-based beta diversity varied much more than traits-based beta diversity, indicating strong functional convergence. We found that taxonomically-based beta diversity was largely driven by the turnover component. However, the nestedness component contributed more to overall traits-based beta diversity than the turnover component. Taxonomically-based beta diversity was significantly correlated with environmental distances for both diatoms and macroinvertebrates. Thus, we found support for the role of environmental filtering as a driver of community dissimilarities of rather different biological groups. However, the strength of these relationships between beta diversity and environmental distances varied depending on the biological group, facet, component, and the way which the environmental variables were selected to calculate the explanatory (distance) matrix. Our results indicated that both taxonomically and traits-based approaches are still needed to better understand patterns and mechanisms affecting the organization of biological communities in streams. This is because different facets of biological communities may be driven by different mechanisms.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s00442-019-04535-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Intermittently freezing and drying lotic systems are common in many parts of the world. These ecosystems provide dynamic habitats for biota, as both freezing and drying processes result in the loss of water flow along stream and river channels. However, research into the ecological effects of intermittent freezing on stream biota has remained relatively scarce compared to the recent increase in studies exploring the ecology of intermittent streams that dry. Climate change is predicted to alter the distribution and dynamics of intermittently freezing stream types. A better understanding of the responses of stream biota to intermittent freezing would inform predictions of the effects of ongoing climate change on these ecosystems. In this review, we compare the effects of both freezing and drying events on stream biota, ranging from individual‐level adaptations to population effects, community‐level biodiversity variation and food webs. Despite major contrasts in environmental conditions (e.g. the drying stream channels are exposed to a direct interaction with the riparian zone during the dry phases and the freezing stream channels are enclosed during the freezing phases), we show that both freezing and drying phenomena have pervasive effects on the structure and dynamics of aquatic stream biota. At the individual organism level, aquatic taxa use a range of physiological, morphological, life‐history, and behavioural responses to persist despite changing habitat conditions in both freezing and drying streams. The variety of organisms’ responses can result in both biodiversity increases and decreases, which may affect population and community dynamics in both ecosystem types. Future research should further explore the population and community‐level effects of freezing in stream ecosystems. Due to the ecological parallels between intermittently drying and freezing streams, approaches developed in research into drying streams may also be applied in freezing stream ecosystems. This could improve our understanding of climate change effects on freezing stream ecosystems.

Different components of global change (e.g., climate change, land use, pollution, and introduced species) continue to alter biodiversity worldwide. As northern regions are still relatively undisturbed and will likely face clear increases in temperature in the near-future, we examined the signs of biodiversity change due to anthropogenic stressors using a systematic review of previous studies. Our aim was to map where, in which way, and owing to which stressor biodiversity in northern regions has changed. We made a systematic literature search covering the years between 2000 and 2015 to obtain a comprehensive selection of recent research. As species richness was clearly the most commonly used indicator of biodiversity, we only concentrated on this aspect of biodiversity. We compared different biological groups, regions, and ecosystems. In the majority of the cases, anthropogenic stressors had decreased species richness, or had no effects on it, while increasing or multiple effects of stressors on species richness were less common. Freshwater ecosystems were most sensitive to anthropogenic stressors, as species richness often decreased owing to these stressors. The effects of land use on richness were covered relatively widely in the selected set of articles, but the effects of other components of global change on species richness require further attention. Despite the fact that pollution was not as commonly studied stressor as land use, it was the most harmful stressor type affecting species richness. Geographically, most studies were located in boreal Canada or Fennoscandia, while no studies were executed in vast circumpolar areas where the temperature rise has been greatest and the projected climate change is likely to be fast. Overall, we could find an alarmingly small set of studies that described the effects of actual anthropogenic stressors in real-life circumstances in northern high latitudes.

Summary In stream ecology, it has traditionally been proposed that local habitat conditions pose a strong environmental filter resulting in predictable community types. However, recent studies have demonstrated continuous rather than discrete community variation along environmental gradients across streams. Our aim was to examine the continuity of stream communities using functional traits of benthic macroinvertebrates. Using previous studies and the environmental filtering paradigm as a background, we hypothesised that the taxonomic composition of communities should vary continuously over environmental gradients, whereas the functional composition of communities should form discrete community types according to specific habitat conditions. As stream environmental characteristics vary between seasons, we also asked if this had an effect on the characteristics of community variation in time. Our data were collected from 50 streams draining into the River Tenojoki (70°N, 27°E) in Finland and Norway. The first data set was collected during late spring 2013 and the second data set during early autumn of the same year. Using multivariate regression trees and constrained ordination methods, we analysed the relationships of taxonomic and functional composition of macroinvertebrate communities to various in‐stream environmental factors. Our results suggest that the variation in the importance of environmental factors between seasons combined with the high heterogeneity of habitats precludes the formation of clear taxonomic and functional community types in northern streams. Conservation efforts should hence focus on including variability in environmental conditions so as to encompass all components of biological communities. However, as there were some noticeable responses of individual traits to different environmental factors, discrete functional communities may be found if key traits of the organisms can be identified.