1,2,10,12,1,10,15,16,- 1Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, River Ecology and Conservation, Germany (dacortesgu@gmail.com)
- 2Finnish Environment Institute, Oulu, Finland
- 3Environmental Protection Agency, Richview, Dublin 14, D14 YR62, Ireland
- 4Freshwater Ecology, Hydrology and Management (FEHM), SHE-2, Institut de Diagnòstic Ambiental i Estudis de l'Aigua (IDAEA), CSIC, Barcelona, Spain
- 5Department for Water and Aquatic Ecosystems, French Biodiversity Agency, 94300 Vincennes, France
- 6Institute of Aquatic Ecology. HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, 1113 Budapest, Karolina út 29, Hungary
- 7Data & Methodology Support Unit, French Biodiversity Agency, 94300 Vincennes, France
- 8Environmental Protection Agency, Richview, Dublin 14, D14 YR62, Ireland
- 9INRAE, UR RiverLy, Centre de Lyon-Villeurbanne, Villeurbanne, France
- 10Department of Animal Sciences and Aquatic Ecology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
- 11Ecology and Genetics Research Unit, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
- 12Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Inland Waters, Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, Anavyssos 19013, Greece
- 13Department of Plant Biology and Ecology, University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Spain
- 14Goethe University Frankfurt, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Institute of Ecology, Evolution and Diversity, Max-von-Laue-Straße 13, 60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
- 15Flanders Environment Agency, Belgium
- 16School of Life Sciences, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom
- 17Faculty of Biology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitätsstraße 5, Essen 45141 Germany
Communities exhibit temporal variability that can be amplified by both natural and anthropogenic environmental changes. Such variability, the inverse of stability, influences ecosystem processes, compromising their functionality. In degraded communities, biodiversity loss might affect temporal stability and weaken ecosystem functioning, whereas in less impacted communities, higher biodiversity enhances aggregate properties (e.g., abundance and composition) and tends to stabilize ecosystem dynamics. A critical question is whether changes in the ecological status of ecosystems affect the ability of communities to buffer environmental variability and maintain ecosystem functions.
Here, we analyzed 4,530 time series of river invertebrates collected between 1971 and 2024 across 23 European countries, encompassing a gradient of ecological status trajectories from degradation to recovery. We quantified temporal trends in community variability based on abundance, taxon composition, and trait composition, and assessed how they relate to trends in ecological status. We further assessed the direct and indirect roles of population-level variability, taxon and trait synchrony (concordant fluctuations), and changes in diversity (richness trend) as mediators of the relationship between community variability and ecological status.
We found that improving communities exhibited lower temporal variability in abundance, taxon and trait composition, indicating increased stability, whereas degrading communities were less stable. For abundance, increasing diversity contributed to stabilization, whereas higher synchrony slightly increased variability, suggesting compensatory dynamics, and population-level variability had a negligible effect. For taxon composition, synchrony slightly increased variability, while for trait composition, population-level variability slightly reduced it. Improvements in ecological status were also associated with higher stability of key ecosystem functions, including dispersion (recolonization dynamics), feeding guilds (energy flows), and resistance forms (disturbance tolerance).
Our findings show that changes in ecological status are linked to the stability of community structure and ecosystem functionality. Improving communities display higher temporal stability, reinforcing the importance of ecological recovery for sustaining reliable and predictable ecosystem functions and services.
How to cite: Cortes Guzman, D., Aroviita, J., Bradley, C., Cañedo-Argüelles, M., Cosson, E., Cunillera-Montcusí, D., Escaffre, R., Feeley, H. B., Ferréol, M., Floury, M., Forio, M. A. E., Goethals, P., Huttunen, K.-L., Karaouzas, I., Larrañaga, A., Moulinec, A., Peredo Arce, A., Vannevel, R., Wilkes, M., and Haase, P.: Ecological recovery increases temporal stability in European river invertebrate communities, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-192, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-192, 2026.
