EXTREME EVENTS: ECOLOGICAL RESPONSE AND RECOVERY

Climate change is interacting with other human stressors to make extreme, unpredictable climatic disturbances such as droughts, floods and heatwaves more common. Our research examines the ecological effects of changing environments, with a particular focus on community responses to and recovery from drought in river ecosystems. We collaborate with national and international colleagues from industry and academia to explore data at local to global scales. By better understanding how populations and communities respond to drought – encompassing low flows at some sites and complete drying at others – our work informs management strategies that improve ecological resilience. From populations to metacommunities, we take advantage of macroinvertebrates: a diverse and abundant biota that allows us to tackle these research questions:

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• How do communities respond to drought disturbances at sites with contrasting flow permanence regimes, and what drives these differences – at local to regional scales?

• How long do communities take to recover from droughts – which species have adaptations promoting resistance or resilience to these disturbance events, and which are impacted for long durations?

• Do aquatic taxa persist in viable, desiccation-tolerant states after free water is lost from the sediments they inhabit: is the invertebrate ‘seedbank’ an important mechanism that increases community resistant to drying?

• Do drought disturbances have comparable or contrasting effects in different biogeographical regions and river networks, and can we distinguish context-independent relationships that apply at global scales?