Longitudinal and temporal assemblage patterns of benthic macroinvertebrates in snow melt stream waters of the Jhelum River Basin of Kashmir Himalaya (India)

Abstract

This article tries to understand the dynamics involving benthic macroinvertebrate studies over 18 watersheds for a period of 2 years in the Jhelum River Basin (JRB) of Kashmir Himalaya, India. We aimed to understand this by recognizing spatiotemporal patterns of macroinvertebrates and their relation to some environmental factors across the whole JRB. A total of 93 taxa pertaining to 3 phyla, 7 classes and 55 families were observed. Our observations revealed that taxa richness, Shannon diversity, total density and percentage of Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera (EPT) metrics considerably declined towards downstream regions. Summer and spring seasons have higher influence on richness, diversity and abundance of most percentage indices. Macrobenthic assemblage structure reflected significant variability with space and time having clear segregation of the downstream sites from upper and midstream reaches in canonical ordination plots. Variation partitioning models [distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA)] showed water discharge and temperature as the main drivers of variation in community structure during summer, whereas fine substrate composition (% sand) and pH were revealed to define the variability in the biology of streams during other seasonal times. Pertinently, much of the variability in benthic faunal assemblages could not be deciphered by environmental drivers and therefore may be linked to other hydrochemical variables (like alkalinity, hardness, chloride and dissolved organic matter) and nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus). Given the apprehension of future climatic changes, understanding spatial and seasonal influences on the macroinvertebrate assemblage structure remains highlighted here, which is crucial for baseline information as well as management of lotic Himalayan systems spanning longitudinal gradients and climatic variability.

Seasonal modifications of longitudinal distribution patterns within a stream: Interspecific interactions in the niche overlap zones of two Ephemera mayflies

“…The distributional area of aquatic insects is often strongly associated with water quality (Jiang et al, 2011 ; Sabha et al, 2020 ). However, the results of water quality analyses in this study did not show any significant relationship in the determination of the distribution the two species (DO, EC, pH, COD, TP, TN).…”

“…The distributional area of aquatic insects is often strongly associated with water quality (Jiang et al, 2011;Sabha et al, 2020).…”

Relationship between macrobenthos and abiotic characteristics of river Alaknanda in a stretch from Chamoli to Devprayag in Garhwal Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, India

“…on macroinvertebrates conservation of two Afrotropical streams (Arimoro et al, 2020), macrobenthos communities of Ghezel Ozan river in Iran (Aazami et al, 2019), on biomonitoring index of pollution assessment by using macroinvertebrates in Tropical African regions (Elias et al, 2014), on Osumi, Devolli, Shkumbini rivers in Albania (Duka et al, 2017) and on the biotic index of macroinvertebrates of Lepenci river in Kosovo (Pajtim et al, 2019). Some studies accomplished by Indian scientists are on macroinvertebrates and water quality assessment of Mahanadi river (Ganguly et al, 2018), monitoring of benthic macroinvertebrates of Dodi Tal, Uttarakhand (Singh and Sharma, 2020) and longitudinal and temporal study of snowmelt stream of Jhelum river of Kashmir (Sabha et al, 2020), Kamboj and Kamboj, (2020) studied river mining affected areas of river Ganga at Haridwar. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the relationship status between physicochemical water quality characteristics and macrobenthos (microinvertebrates) of river Alaknanda in a stretch from Chamoli to Devprayag in Garhwal Himalayan region of Uttarakhand.…”