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Defining Patterns and Rates of Natural vs. Drought Driven Aquatic Community Variability Indicates the Ongoing Need for Long Term Ecological Research

Few ecologists have not used climate change to support their findings in researching the vulnerability of specific taxa, communities or ecosystems. Long term biological/ community data, with which the climate change effects on communities can be patterned over a longer period then a few years are almost non-existent. A 13-year research program with monthly sampling in the Dinaric karst region of Croatia, south Europe, aimed to comprehensively track freshwater insect (namely true fly: Diptera) emergence patterns in a pristine aquatic environment. This coincided with a severe drought that occurred in 2011/2012. This event caused the highest magnitudes of drought (low precipitation rates for an extended period of time) in the region since the beginning of the twentieth century. We presented patterns of seasonal and yearly dynamics as Euclidian distance measures of similarity in true fly community composition compared at increasing temporal distance between samples. This was done in order to determine the degree of temporal variability of similarity within the community of a specific site and define patterns of similarity change over time. Community recovery was detected and shown to still be ongoing even seven years after the event itself. This indicated not only that the freshwater habitats have not yet fully recovered, but also raised concern whether a full recovery could even be possible if a similar climate-change-influenced event was to happen in the future.

community recovery, convergence, Dipteran community, drought

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