Functional traits of aquatic macroinvertebrates – a future tool of environmental monitoring?

Summary

Physical-chemical changes to a locality can be tracked through changes in benthic macroinvertebrate functional and taxonomic community composition and provide us with important information about the health status of aquatic ecosystems. Taxonomically based biological monitoring of macroinvertebrate in rivers is widely used, has a long history, and is based on the presence or absence of expected taxa and the proportion of sensitive/tolerant organisms. The taxonomic approach has been very successful, but can be developed further. Several studies on the relationship between biological diversity and ecosystem services has concluded that the ecological roles of the species present is important, and not just their taxonomic numbers. Use of functional traits can provide a measure of functional diversity that more closely monitor the ecosystems function than earlier methods. Functional traits have shown relatively high stability over seasons and large geographic areas, low need of taxonomic resolution and relatively low demand for replication and has the potential to inaugurate a new era in environmental monitoring of fresh water (and other) ecosystems. Work is still needed on the development of trait databases, identification, development of analysis techniques and biological indices. But the large and growing interest makes the development go faster now than ever before.