Forest drainage: a threat to benthic biodiversity of boreal headwater streams?

Macroinvertebrate species and assemblages in the headwater streams of the River Tyne, northern England in relation to land cover and other environmental variables

“…The analyses revealed that water pH was also associated with invertebrate distribution but there was weaker relationships with distance from source and land cover. There has been relatively few reports of the importance of site structure as a determinant of stream invertebrate distribution, although it was shown to be related to the presence of water beetles in streams (Eyre et al, 1993;Dietrich & Waringer, 1999) and the amount and type of stream vegetation has been shown to be affect both species invertebrate assemblage distribution and richness (Vuori et al, 1998;Armitage & Cannan, 2000;Wright et al, 2003). Water acidity has been implicated as a primary influence on the distribution of stream macroinvertebrates Paavola et al, 2003) and acidification has proved to a problem in streams of some mountain areas (Guerold et al, 2000;Lepori et al, 2003).…”

“…Forests, particularly dense coniferous plantations, have been shown lower stream water pH (Ventura & Harper, 1996;Tierney et al, 1996;Dangles & Guerold, 1999). The beds of streams draining forests in Finland had more sand than those in open country (Vuori & Joensuu, 1998), affecting site structure. Land cover and use in the Tyne catchment was likely to have an influence the stream invertebrates only if it affected site structure or pH but no strong relationships were observed.…”

Impacts of artificial drainage on amphibian breeding sites in hemiboreal forests

“…Large-scale draining should be avoided in such areas (see also Sjöberg and Ericson, 1997) because of many ecosystem services they provide (Kimmel and Mander, 2010), including various biodiversity considerations (Wiktander et al, 1992;Nilsson, 1997). In addition to amphibians, negative effects of intensive forest drainage (especially via habitat changes) have been demonstrated for many other taxa Vuori et al, 1998;Ludwig et al, 2008;Louhi et al, 2010).…”

“…Such impacts on freshwater environments have been described in many studies (e.g. Vuori et al, 1998;Prévost et al, 1999). Regarding faunal responses, there are several studies on soil mesofauna (e.g.…”

“…Regarding faunal responses, there are several studies on soil mesofauna (e.g. Markkula, 1986;Silvan et al, 2000;Laiho et al, 2001) and stream biota (Vuori and Joensuu, 1996;Vuori et al, 1998;Bond and Downes, 2003;Louhi et al, 2010), but only a few on vertebrates Ludwig et al, 2008).…”