Abstract
Barriers preventing species from dispersing to a location can have a major influence on how communities assemble. Dispersal success may also depend on whether dispersers have to colonise an established community or a largely depauperate location. In freshwater systems, dams and weirs have fragmented rivers, potentially limiting dispersal of biota along rivers. Decommissioning aqueducts on two weirs, each within a tributary of different regulated rivers, delivered flow to previously dry riverbeds and additional flows to the main stem, regulated rivers further downstream. This provided an opportunity to test how removal of dispersal constraints affected community assembly in new habitats and whether changed dispersal can alter existing communities. The results were very similar for the two systems. Even with dispersal constrained via reduced drift rates, the new communities in the newly formed habitat in tributaries rapidly resembled unimpacted reference communities that were the source of colonists. For established communities (regulated rivers), greater flow increased the densities of filter feeders but this was due to greater areas of fast-flowing habitat (a change in environmental constraints) rather than higher dispersal rates. Our study illustrates that communities can quickly re-assemble when natural channels that have been dry for decades are re-wetted by flows that deliver dispersers from intact locations upstream. Nevertheless, boosting flows and concomitant densities of dispersers had no strong effects on existing communities. Instead, increased discharges effected a reduction in environmental constraints, which altered trophic structure. Thus, increases in discharge and dispersal produced different outcomes in new versus established communities.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank to Tim Haeusler and Daniel Coleman for working long days and late nights during field sampling. We are also grateful for the assistance of Daniel Coleman in the laboratory. Snowy Hydro and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service kindly provided access to many of the sampling locations. This project was funded by NSW Department of Primary Industry—Water. Additional funding was provided by the University of Melbourne—School of Geography and a grant from the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment awarded to A. Brooks. We thank two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions greatly improved the manuscript.
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Funding was primarily provided by the New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment—Water. Additional funding was provided by the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment (grant no. TA100090).
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AJB, JL, BJD and BW conceived and designed the study. AJB and BW undertook the fieldwork. AJB analysed the data. AJB, JL and BJD wrote the manuscript.
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Communicated by Leon A. Barmuta.
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Brooks, A.J., Lancaster, J., Downes, B.J. et al. Just add water: rapid assembly of new communities in previously dry riverbeds, and limited long-distance effects on existing communities. Oecologia 194, 709–722 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04799-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04799-2